the summer soldier
by irishais
Summary: This is what it feels like, when you fall from grace. Seifer x Squall, in the aftermath.
1. the fall

**the summer soldier.**

 _-irishais-_

 _he screams, wings ripped from his back, blood coursing down his spine, red, red, red, everything will be forever red_ -

this is how you fly too close to the sun, this is how it feels when you fall.

* * *

 **one**.

In the beginning, there was Seifer Almasy, eight years old, his height ticked off on the new door frame of a Garden apartment, measurements written in pencil, four and a half feet tall already. He is growing like a weed.

It takes him exactly two months before he finds himself in the infirmary for the first time, and it's because of a fight he started. He likes the way the blood feels coursing along his tongue, relishes in the empty space where a loose baby tooth once sat, now lost somewhere in the gym mats, and he is _defiant_ in how proud he is of himself.

His father does not ground him. This is Garden. This is how it is.

He is eleven when he breaks the five-foot mark, ticked off in permanent marker high above last year's notation, an annual tradition. His mother will want to see it, when she returns to the mainland from her years and years out on the boat- Cid coats the marks in clear paint, preserving them forever.

Seifer deigns to hang around for cake, and between he, Fujin, and Raijin, the grocery-store concoction disappears hunk by slice by edible icing balloon. He takes a piece wrapped in plastic back to his dorm, and it serves as a midnight snack when he's bent over his terminal, trying to suss out the solution to a problem on his homework.

He is thirteen. Fifteen. Seventeen.

The second round of his SeeD exam is a _miserable_ failure, Xu Chang ends up shot, he ends up in detention, neither of them attend the graduation ball- not that he would be _allowed_ , and he feels the weight of _forever cadet_ hanging on his shoulders. No one's failed this many times before, he's sure of it. Garden doesn't tolerate failure, doesn't tolerate SeeDs disobeying orders, going against the mission parameters to save a teammate's ass.

He leaves Xu a little potted daisy that he nicked from Garden's greenhouse, and makes sure he's gone from the infirmary before she wakes up and can give him shit about it. He's a nice guy. He's a good person.

He's just a miserable goddamned failure.

Eighteen years old, and there is a war on. Eighteen years old, and he tastes blood between his teeth, sucking it out with a long, indrawn breath, copper-bitter as it slides across his tongue and is spat onto the ground.

There's a war on, and he is its hero, its _champion_ , the Sorceress before him with her face that never quite falls into place, her raven hair and her feathered gown. He bows his head, and she crowns him her knight.

Let them come for her. He will slaughter them all.

He is eighteen years old, and the war will eat him up and spit him out, but for now, he dreams in shatterglass unfocused reality.

He is eighteen.

The seduction is almost anticlimactic, when Ultimecia sheds her person-suit, the witch she was wearing, and by this point, he's too far gone to say no, to defy her in any way that will result in another long night at the hands of her torturers far too gleefully good at their jobs in the dungeons of her castle.

(poor, pretty boy, shed your skin and come to bed)

He is eighteen, with no memory of how he got here, pressing a cattleprod into Squall Leonhart's guts, demanding answers to questions that he doesn't even think he's really _asking_ , the smell of burnt flesh acidic, foul, in the air around him.

Seifer stabs him again, again, again.

He is eighteen, and then nineteen.

There is no birthday party in the witch's palace. He cleans blood from beneath his nails, bandages split knuckles and a busted index finger. A phantom blond watches him in the grimy, ornate mirror, a ghost of a man who wears sun-freckled tan skin and eyes of green seaglass, a (poor, poor boy).

He is nineteen, when they catch him in the wilderness of Timber, when someone shoots him with a taser and brings him down a thrashing, panicked beast (not that he can fight them, he is nineteen and half-starved, worn down to nothing, a broken, broken man).

They cuff him, anyway, and Nida Warren breaks his nose when Seifer sneers some half-formed insult about his mother.

Seifer spends the flight back to Garden with his head held back and blood along his white-white teeth.

* * *

"Go away."

He doesn't leave. Doesn't particularly want to lurk around the glaring fluorescent-lit halls of the detention wing, cells lining either side and only one boasting _no vacancy_. Squall exhales.

"I _said_ , fuck off."

That's more like it, but there's no vitriol behind it, no fury. He'd honestly expected more. Seifer looks like a kicked, abandoned dog, hidden in what shadows he can find at the far reaches of his cell. It's too small a space for him, and somehow, not even the looming Almasy can fill it up. War has diminished him, left blackened bruises beneath both eyes (that might be the nose, though).

He is a study in failure. Squall puts his hands in his pockets, quiet, observing. He doesn't even flinch at the explosion of the plastic lunch tray against the metal cell bars.

"Tch. You want them to shock you again?"

It's fitting retaliation, and Squall would be lying if he said he thought Seifer didn't _deserve_ a taste of his own medicine.

"Kiss my ass."

It is not particularly witty. Squall shrugs.

"I don't know where it's been. Pass."

A low, loaded groan emits from somewhere deep in Seifer's throat. This is what passes for conversation, for meaningful interaction. He is a caged mutt now, the wolf gone, lost somewhere in the war.

"You could've shot me, you know. Saved all of Balamb a _shitload_ of tax money."

He has to laugh, three beats of it falling in disbelief from his lips, and Squall shrugs, leaning back against the wall across from Seifer's cell. "We're not government affiliated. Not how it works. I could still shoot you, though. If you want."

For a while, Seifer seems to be considering the offer, and finally draws himself up from his corner, trading floor for the dubious comfort of a bread-thin mattress on a slab of concrete bed.

"Nah, you'd miss. I'd probably be pissing into a bag for the rest of my life."

"You're probably right."

There are a hundred questions he wants to ask. There are a hundred that he _doesn't_. He settles for doing what he came down here to do, and sticks a battered paperback between the cell bars, some shitty fantasy novel, the best Garden's library had to offer. Seifer's probably already read it, but Squall knows something about solitude and silence.

Knows that Seifer won't survive if he has nothing to fill those long-long-long hours with.

Doesn't know if it counts as forgiveness, though, the passing of a book, barbs laced with sarcasm traded as easily as gunblade blows.

He leaves Seifer in that bright-lit hall.

* * *

He is left in light and silence.

Seifer stares at the book dropped at the foot of his cot.


	2. hard landings

**two**.

He is twenty, and he has been drunk since seven-thirty this morning.

He's been drunk since three days ago, if he's being honest, stumbling through the hell that is his apartment, back itching dead-center where Garden stuck a tracking chip beneath his skin, embedded so deeply that he _shouldn't_ be able to feel it, but _shouldn't_ and _can_ are miles apart, and Seifer, not for the first time, considers taking a knife to the meat of his back.

He settles for vodka instead. It is the very cheapest kind, the one used more for cleaning wounds or disinfecting things. It is possibly paint thinner. This would not surprise him.

It's snowing outside, starlight falling in delicate flakes to coat the entire island in something like _purity_. He doesn't belong here. It itches in his feet, it burns his toes, he wants to _leave_ , wants to jump headfirst into the frozen sea and swim, swim, swim until something devours him or he touches land in Dollet.

Either, or.

Maybe he'll drown, first. That could be an exciting way to go, extinguish the flickering flame he's become once and for all, put to rest all those rumors of him going supernova and slaughtering everyone in town.

Seifer trips over a sneaker in the middle of the floor, but manages to hold onto the bottle as he falls, cradling it to his chest as if it were an infant, a valuable, precious thing, five gil strung together from coins and passed in a hand too shaky from lack of drink to be embarrassed at his desperation anymore. He practically coos to it, tells the vodka it will be _okay_ , it's alright, he's here and he'll drink it.

"What the hell happened in here?"

He is mid-soothe to his liquor, and hasn't even heard the door open. Maybe he's finally snapped, hallucinating Commander Leonhart and Lt. Commander Chang in the middle of his living room. It would figure that his hallucinations would be so stupid.

Seifer gives them the finger, and drinks deeply, finding the end of the bottle, setting it meticulously upright on the floor next to him. Good bottle. Good drink.

The room shifts to the left, and slide back like taffy, a slow stretch and a snap-break into reality.

The floor is very comfortable. He falls back against it, and there's a murmur of surprise from the figment-ghosts of his imagination. Hm. Tired. Sleep.

Xu is on the floor in front of him, crouched, snapping her fingers in his face.

"He's not dead. He's just wasted."

"I had a dream like this once," he says, his voice heavy along numb lips. "You were naked, though." He honks her boob, and she removes his hand with a sharp twist that almost registers as _pain_.

Seifer makes a noise of indignation.

There is the bright glare of a Sleep spell coming off of Xu's palm,

" _Bitch-_ "

and then he registers nothing.

* * *

"Hyne, he's drunk." Xu sounds _disgusted_ , standing, wiping her hands off on the polished dark denim of expensive jeans, and Squall doesn't blame her. Seifer is a mess, but at least he's not dead, which is the whole reason they've trekked across town in this weather.

He calls Cid, leaves a terse voicemail, and pockets his phone, looking down at the unconscious man at their feet.

"We can't just leave him like this."

"Yes, we can."

She's not wrong. They made sure he wasn't a cooling corpse. That was the extent of the job (the favor, really). Squall sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

"Get his feet," he instructs, moving to the far side of Almasy. It's like lifting a Behemoth corpse, the dead weight that is one ex-mercenary turned lapdog turned war criminal (formally pardoned). There is something like a bed in the next room. With some effort, they maneuver Seifer down the hall, Xu only _accidentally_ smacking him into the wall once, and deposit him in the rumpled sheets. It's freezing in here, and it smells _rank_.

Seifer sleeps like a goddamned baby. Happy birthday to you, asshole.

Squall wrinkles his nose, and turns away. "Go home," he tells Xu. "I'll keep an eye on him."

Her expression is incredulous, but he knows she won't disobey this direct order, pulling her gloves from her coat pocket, and catching the car keys he tosses in her direction.

"Whatever they're paying you, sir, it's not enough."

"Good night, Xu."

He shuts the door behind her, and surveys the disaster area. Seifer has never been _messy_. Fastidious to a fault, sometimes, especially where personal grooming was concerned, and besides, living in dorms left little space for personal possessions. Seifer's room had always been spartan and military-neat, barely lived in (but Squall supposes that's what happens when you're a teenager and _popular_.)

This is like some bad movie, a _crime scene_. He wouldn't be surprised to see blood dried on the walls.

Almasy snores. Squall finds an empty plastic bag, and fills it too quickly with bottles and cans and bent-metal caps. God. Xu's right. He's not getting paid enough for this shit. Not that he's getting paid for this at all.

Maybe it's guilt, that crap that gets brought up like a tired joke in therapy, about making Seifer this way. The indirect cause of his failure, the foil to his fall- Squall gets the girl and Garden and glory.

Seifer gets an apartment on the bad end of town, paid for by his desperate, tired father, and cirrhosis, most likely.

It's not fair.

Maybe Squall should have killed him in one of a dozen chances during the war. Irvine wouldn't have had any qualms about shooting him, and if _he_ had, Xu certainly wouldn't have had them. The war would've been over in days, rather than a year. He thinks about that a lot, the cobbled together team, the whole _fated_ thing.

An entire school of SeeD. The world laid to waste.

He sighs, and cleans, and finds himself tying up a third plastic bag before he realizes it, a pile forming by the door. There's not much he can do about the smell, not when it's twenty degrees outside, a blizzard raging through the narrow streets.

Seifer sleeps. Squall picks up the fragments of his life.

This, somehow, seems like it's becoming a habit.


	3. bared

**three.**

he is eighteen, and he is afraid.

the witch circles him, runs her claws along his shoulder, dances them down his spine, defiantly straight in spite of all that she has inflicted upon him. _traitor_ , she calls him in a voice that dances like music, _failure_.

koward, miserable, _pathetik_ koward.

little dog.

she breaks three fingers on his right hand with one sharp twist, and breaks three on his left just to make things even again. he screams, he screams. he has failed her, he deserves this, he deserves everything he gets.

how dare he betray the one who lifted him from mediocrity and into _greatness_? how _dare he_?

her purple-painted lips linger near his ear, leave a kiss along his throat, _you vile kur._

lightning screams through his veins the next time she lays hands on him, and seifer dies under her torture this time, actually _dies_ for a sold three minutes before she deigns to bring him back, claws creeping into his chest and squeezing his heart back to beating.

* * *

He is still twenty years old when he wakes up, hurls himself left, and vomits on the floor.

Unfortunate, that he wakes up at all, his mouth scraped dry as the Centran desert, sweat dried clammy-cold on his skin. Seifer lays there in bed, and has absolutely no recollection of getting there at all last night.

He shouldn't be surprised. Blackouts have become his closest companion. It's not like the posse's got his back anymore; might as well get himself into trouble and not remember it in the morning.

It's just a continuation of time compression.

Seifer retches again, feels Ultimecia's lips along his throat, and wants to die.

It's penance, or petty revenge, or-

"No, god, no, just _go away_ ," he breathes on a ragged choking cough, _please_ just leave him alone, he is _twenty years old_ and he is _tired_. (She's right, she'll always be right, he's pathetic. It's no wonder Garden left him to turn his coat.)

There is nothing left to come up from his stomach, just vodka and acid. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand, trembling in the aftermath. It'd be really fucking nice not to wake up like this all the time. He could do with a change. Even insomnia would be a refreshing break.

His mouth tastes vile, and the room smells like puke. Great.

Seifer pushes himself out of his bed, strips filthy clothes, fumbles naked into the hall, intent on a shower and whatever he can scrape together from the undoubtedly moldy remnants in his fridge. Either, or. Doesn't matter what order those things happen in, as long as they do, and frankly, he's willing to pass on the shower.

At least, that's what he says until he steps into it, cold water knifing into his skin, the agony of it seared away by sudden heat. This building's plumbing sucks, and he's too hungover for this, too itchy-gross, like he's been hit with a spell-

 _Chang_.

He swears, slams his fist against the tile, knocks off a bottle of shampoo onto the floor. The plastic bursts, seam striking the wrong way, leaving a blue smear along the floor.

Fuck it.

Seifer scrubs a bar of soap into his hair, into his skin, tries anything to keep his person-suit intact. He is a monster wearing a man's skin, and he is _way_ too fucking hungover for this. The shower doesn't last long before it runs cold again. He kills the flow, realizes he has nothing resembling a towel hanging on the bar, the last one filthy and chucked into the overflowing corner of the bathroom he charitably calls a _laundry basket_.

Dammit.

Hell with it. He brushes a three-day bender off his teeth, chucks the toothbrush back in its cup, and stalks out of the bathroom, stopping abruptly in the hall. There's a knife on his bookshelf, tucked among the battered old novels. He slides his hand around the grip, on high alert in a way he hasn't been since the _war._ Funny, what not being drunk off his gourd does to his senses.

There's someone in his apartment.

* * *

He is asleep, and then he is very suddenly not, eyes bursting open.

Squall doesn't move, not when there's an eight-inch Galbadian steel knife at his throat. He is much smarter than that. Especially when the damp hand that holds it is shaking just a little bit. Not a bad grip for a man who's been drinking since the war ended.

"Easy, easy," he says, trying to be reassuring when he sounds still half-asleep, propped upright on Seifer Almasy's couch. "Relax. I'm not here to-"

"What the _fuck_ are you doing here?"

The blade digs into Squall's throat; it doesn't take much before there's a bead of blood dancing along the knife's edge, dripping down, down, splotching on his gray t-shirt. Seifer might be bigger, badder, stronger, but he's a barely functioning thing wearing a person-suit, and Squall's commander of Balamb Garden.

He's got this, drawing a Stop spell in tiny controlled bursts into his palm.

"Headmaster Kramer asked us to come check on you. Xu left before I did. I got snowed in." Careful, easy, like talking to a frightened animal, one that's growling and baring its teeth. "Hey- Seifer. Stop. I'm not your enemy."

"No, you're just a spy. You're just doing my dear old _dad's_ dirty work."

Seifer's grip tightens. It'd be a funny scenario, if Squall weren't reconsidering his earlier assessment. He finds a nerve on Seifer's hand, squeezes sharply, and the knife drops.

"He signs my paychecks."

Squall collects the blade from the floor, looks at it curiously- it's Garden-issue, lethal even in inexperienced hands, and Seifer is far from that. But part of his parole is not carrying anything that could be considered a weapon. (Admittedly, he doesn't blame Seifer for breaking that; no cadet worth their salt ever leaves Garden's campus unarmed.)

With a twist, he flips the knife, and holds it hilt-out to the naked man who tried to kill him, purposefully keeping his eyes _up_.

It's too fucking early for any of this.

Seifer's face twists, contorts into six different expressions before he settles on one Squall can only define as _incredulous_ , surveying the room as he takes the knife back.

"Good lord, Leonhart, did you fucking _clean_?"

Squall shrugs, one-shouldered. "I wasn't gonna sleep on empty bottles. I can send you a bill on Garden letterhead for my services, if it'll make you feel any better."

God, Seifer looks like shit even _clean_ , smells like liquor up close and personal, has a beard like a Trabian mountain man growing in. And they'd thought he was bad under cover of darkness and nearly-dead naked lightbulbs. Squall masks an involuntary step backwards into a turn, reaching for his coat draped over the arm of the sofa, a makeshift pillow.

He shrugs it on, and crosses to the window, peering through the blinds. The snow's stopped, but Balamb is blanketed in white and silence, boats bobbing along the docks, moored. Storm was that bad, then, if even the fishermen have stayed home.

"Well. See ya."

He leaves a dripping wet, very naked Seifer standing in the middle of his living room, with a deeply confused look on his face, and Squall tries to burn that look into his memory, just for future blackmail.

It's going to be a weird week. He can tell already.

Squall leaves the bags of bottles piled next to the door, but pauses on his way out.

"Oh. Yeah. Happy birthday."

He goes.

The door shuts quietly behind him.


	4. icefall

**four.**

Therapy is one of those unkind beasts, horns and teeth, claws and snarls.

 _Seifer's_ provider of this unique brand of torture is a former Galbadian Army drill sergeant turned headshrinker when he took a bullet in between two vertebrae and got himself confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his natural life. If karma is anything that Seifer can believe him, this asshole will spend eternity in that same chair, and it'll be on fire.

He doesn't like the guy, but it's court-mandated, and it's not like Garden is going to give him a choice in this matter.

So he goes, three times a week, four PM to five, his beat-up motorcycle tearing through the winding mountain pass to the other side of the island, wind ripping at his face, a helmet a non-consideration.

It is the only time he ever feels alive, doing ninety miles per hour around sharp bends gouged into stone; if it kills him, so what? At least he won't have to go to another one of these fucking appointments ever again.

Safe to say, Seifer Almasy does not particularly _enjoy_ discussing a few specific things: feelings, his mother, his father, the war, and Ultimecia. Luckily for him, there's a whole hour ahead of him where they're going to do just that. Oh, boy. How delightful. Let him just take a moment to curb his enthusiasm.

He is making it a personal mission to get through one of these hours and not say a single word, but he's never been very good at that, either, and by the time the clock ticks over ten past, he groans, flops back against the overplush sofa back, and spreads his hands wide.

Dr. Chilton watches him, hard face placid with non-judgment, an expensive fountain pen laid across his pad of bright yellow legal paper. Like a bunch of daisies. Tilmitt's dress. Sunny, even.

If he cared enough to voice his opinion.

It's just paper. He doesn't care.

There's a hole in his jeans, worn through the left knee. Seifer lowers his hands, running his thumb along the washed-soft edge, picking at the threads; he meets Dr. Chilton's gaze.

Therapy doesn't scare him. He's been under the thumb of worse beasts.

"Y'know, you'd probably get a lot more willing victims in this chair if you offered a beer or snacks or some shit," Seifer says into the oppressive silence, before it gets too much, threatening to overwhelm and smother him. "You probably make a boatload off of your patients. Get one of those things you put whiskey in. The good shit."

"Would that make you feel more at ease?"

His fingers keep working at the knot of threads at the edge of the tear, and Seifer offers a dismissive, brief shrug.

"It was just an idea. Nothing to do with what I want."

"It's interesting, that your immediate suggestion is alcohol. I find people to be more talkative if you present them with coffee. It invites a more friendly environment. Like going out with your companions for lunch."

He thinks, briefly, of Fujin and Raijin, and walls off the thought before it can spiral too deeply away. They are exiled, invited to live anywhere but in Balamb, and so it makes no sense to want what he can't, legally, have.

"Then get a fucking coffee maker. I don't care."

He could really, really use a drink, now that he's thinking about it. Seifer falls silent, wrenching the threads free with one sharp jerk. They fall in a scattered pattern onto the grey carpet of Dr. Chilton's office, and he can't even see where they've landed.

The entire conversation lasts less than five minutes. Forty-seven more minutes to go. They are the longest of his life.

"Can't you just drug me or some shit? Make me some docile member of society so we don't have to keep going through this? You don't care about my problems; you probably just want to write a book about me and retire to fucking... I dunno. Centra, or something."

"How are you sleeping, speaking of medication? Have you been taking the prescription I gave you?"

"It cost seventy-five gil to fill it. So I didn't."

Cruelty in his voice. How long before he can make Chilton fear him? The first session, Seifer had been sedated for, jabbed in the arm with a needle by Dr. Kadowaki and driven across town in handcuffs, escorted by three very large SeeDs who made him feel _short_.

Twenty-eight minutes.

"Besides, vodka's cheap, and just as effective."

Suck on that, science. He's got booze on his side.

Chilton makes a note on his pad of paper, in looping, undoubtedly graceful handwriting. Bastard. How does _he_ sleep at night, gleaning every scrap of information he can from his criminal patient, and undoubtedly forwarding all of it straight to his father?

Doctor-patient confidentiality is a joke.

"I'm concerned, Seifer, that you're using your drinking as a crutch. Alcoholism isn't a healthy coping mechanism. You're repressing, rather than working through your problems."

"I don't have any fucking problems."

* * *

Tap, tap, tap.

Tap, tap, tap.

Scritch, scratch, pen dancing in short, jerky lines across the margins of the latest report, a bunch of graphs he doesn't care about that are supposed to represent the upswing in rogue source magic around Timber.

He doesn't care about Timber, doesn't want to care about Timber, doesn't want to sit here listening to Quistis drone on and on and on and _on_ about source magic and sorceresses and the Time Compression almost-success, the fallout from their spectacular near-miss at saving the world. Good on them, they won the war, but now here's a shitload of paperwork, have _fun_.

Squall deeply, deeply considers throwing himself out the nearest window and rappelling down the side of Garden, making a run for it before anyone can catch him.

(Rinoa was always good at escape.)

His pen moves, ink flows, her face appears in a few lines and a handful of long strokes suggesting her hair. It is too much for him, trapped in this meeting, and the benefit of being commander is that he can get up, gather his things, leave without more than an, _excuse me_.

He doesn't even give them that, just goes, the door shutting quietly behind him. It's thirteen degrees out, the coldest snap Balamb has had in a very long time- it's something to do with Ultimecia, and her attempts to compress everyone's existence, leaving it a balmy seventy degrees in Trabia during January and stripping Balamb of its eternal spring and summer.

Dollet's sunset arrives an hour later than everywhere else in the world. No one knows what to make of that.

(Rinoa does, says it's something to do with the ebb and flow of the source magic, the way it dances through the ether and affects everything it touches.)

He has to stop thinking about her. Has to. Forces himself to, stopping in the nearest SeeD lounge to collect a cup of coffee that has been sitting on the burner since before the war, gulping it down in a few long swallows, chucking the styrofoam cup into the trash.

It's after five, when he looks in impatience at his phone. He needs to get out of here. Go somewhere, anywhere, trudge through all that snow and get dinner or something.

Squall takes the stairs up to the third floor at a jog, stopping at his office long enough to dump the notes from the meeting and shut off his laptop, collect his coat and gloves and scarf. It's cold, it's so cold, and Shiva roils happily in his brain at it, so delighted that he doesn't have the heart to disconnect her, pack her in her case and save her for tomorrow.

Instead, Squall shoves gloved hands deep in the pockets of his heavy black wool trench, collar turned up against the frozen breeze, nose numb the second he steps outside. Fuck it.

He walks into town, and every step pulls a little bit more at the knot of panic in his chest. Rinoa made her choice, going with Edea to the lighthouse at the edge of the world, beholden to no one save the power that spreads as spilled ink in her chest.

(it's something about the bond that makes him feel this, makes him know where she is without thinking too much about it, something keeping them together, a thin chain that no matter what either of them do, they can't break. and they have tried so, so _very_ hard to break it.)

Seifer's apartment building is a narrow three-floor walkup, six tenants in total (currently two, but it's the winter and the rent is almost exorbitant for what you get for it). It's clean, it's not in the worst part of town, and Squall has it on good authority that Headmaster Kramer outright _bought_ the third floor just so no one would be saddled with being neighbors with his deranged son.

The pizza is warm even through his gloves, and he shifts the box and the six-pack of beer to one side so that he can rap hard on Seifer's door.


	5. drinking and now drunk

**five.**

(six beers remaining.)

He's thumbing through a book he's read at least half a dozen times before, when the knock occurs. Seifer dog-ears a corner, swearing all the while- he's been home for ten goddamned minutes, can't people just _leave him alone?_ The book's tossed on the coffee table, taking out a stack of junk mail upon landing.

Screw it. He leaves it scattered across the floor. If it's someone trying to sell him religion, Seifer has absolutely no qualms about decking them back to last century. He twists the knob.

"Leonhart?"

Leonhart, alone- and Seifer checks, leaning out the door and looking both ways down the hall, scouting for SeeD dragged in the dear Commander's wake. Unless he's hiding a gunblade in that pizza box (that smells so good Seifer's stomach lets out an involuntary rumble, a reminder that maybe he should eat once in awhile), Squall's not come to haul him back to prison.

In theory, anyway.

"Pick up some part-time work?" he sneers. "Because you suck at it. I didn't order anything."

"Shut up and let me in."

"Make me."

Squall holds up a six-pack of beer. Seifer only needs half a second to glance at the label on the box- it's an old favorite, one of those ten-gil a pack brands that's brewed in Dollet and could serve as a dinner substitution. He'd stopped drinking it when the gil stopped flowing after Garden un-froze his assets.

Now it's whatever's cheap and will get him drunk, and drinking at home means he doesn't have to tip a bartender for the pleasure of shoveling him out the door at closing time.

Seifer snatches the box.

"Sold. Pizza come with it?"

Leonhart looks at him steadily, pinning him beneath eyes that make Seifer feel kind of like a bug Squall hasn't decided if he's going to squash or not. Somewhere between the war and now, he's grown into a functional, competent human being who is capable of projecting more than just total indifference.

Astonishing.

Seifer takes the pizza, too, before Leonhart can change his mind, tossing the box on his kitchen counter and setting down the beer with a little more reverence. He's been sober for something like six hours, and it's starting to wear on him.

Bare hands prize off the caps of two bottles. Who needs an opener, when he's got grip strength that can shatter a man's bones? He flicks the bent-coin lids into the sink.

The first drink is the most important, the one he'll remember, when he wakes up tomorrow and has to ask himself if it's worth it. It's rich, an oak-dark stout that sweeps like chocolate across his tongue, a sweet honey aftertaste. The noise he makes is close to orgasmic.

" _God_. That's good shit."

It is just as good the second sip, and he regrets opening a bottle for Leonhart, sharing this gift at all, because if Seifer is going to spend tonight pissed out of his mind, he wants it to be _exclusively_ on this.

The best beer he's ever had in his entire life, two slices of extremely cheesy, very hot pizza from the only place in town that knows what it's doing- he feels normal, for a minute, settling himself back against the counter to eat, drink and be merry.

One slice is gone and his first bottle empty before Seifer thinks to ask, "Are you bribing me for something?"

* * *

(five beers remaining.)

Seifer eats like he's starving.

No wonder, considering the contents of his fridge- and unless he's suddenly won the lottery, Squall's willing to bet that things haven't changed. He isn't sure what he's doing here, just that there are vestiges of Rinoa lingering in his veins, and she is the one thing he and Seifer have in common anymore.

Stardust and bloodshed. That's a hell of a combination.

He drinks, slowly eats his first slice as Seifer is well on his way through his second, and chews, bread and marinara and an excess of cheese sliding down his throat with the swallow before he shakes his head.

"No."

How does he even begin to explain why he's here, anyway?

"I was in town."

Yeah, that'll do. He drinks to avoid the pursuant follow-up question that he knows is coming, because Seifer was a dog with a bone when he wanted answers even before the war, and afterward, no one does anything nice for a monster unless they want something in exchange.

Seifer is many things, but most certainly a monster.

His laugh is disbelieving, sharp in the relative peace that comes with dinner, and Squall nearly chokes on his drink with the sudden force of it, unsure of where it even _came_ from, these thoughts of beasts and witches.

He coughs, pounds his chest with a closed fist, and sets the beer down.

Seifer does not offer any sort of aid, but Squall isn't expecting him to, leaning back in his seat and dragging his hand down his face when the fit is gone.

They have never lied to each other, not once, not since they were kids and Seifer conned him into thinking mud was a chocolate pie.

"You haven't heard from Rinoa at all, have you?"

There. It's in the open air between them, and he cannot take it back. She has been between them since the SeeD ball, all that time ago, a pretty thing in a slip of a dress dragging him out onto the dance floor against all of his better judgement.

She will always be between them, since Seifer tried to feed her to Adel, since the Lunatic Pandora, since the succession, since the black void of space.

There are a hundred things he can't forgive Seifer for, and Rinoa is at the heart of all of them.

He looks at Seifer, wants an answer, needs one.

Seifer shrugs, and drinks.

"Nope."

Squall doesn't know what the hell else he expected.

"Oh," he says. "Okay."

He picks up his bottle and drinks, drains it like it is warm milk before bedtime, and in pursuit of emptiness, is beginning to understand why Seifer takes such pleasure in a thing that will destroy him in the end (has already destroyed him, here in this too-cold apartment on the shore of Balamb.)

* * *

(four beers remaining.)

He opens another pair, passes one across the narrow expanse of his kitchen.

Rinoa dances like smoke and moonlight across his mind, Rinoa smiles too fully, shines too brightly, and he knows it now for sure, that he'd felt the magic radiating off of her since the moment they met at a festival in Timber.

Rinoa is between them now, raven hair, satin skin. Squall's head bowed over his beer, the resigned curve in his shoulders, the magic that screams and sings beneath Seifer's skin, calling out to its familiars- he's known, he's always known, ever since his mother found him alone on the beach playing with the stars he'd plucked from the sky.

(the succession must always continue, but he'd slipped that noose, didn't he, when Ultimecia cast him aside like garbage?)

Seifer clears his throat, shrugs again. "I'll, uh. Let you know if I do hear anything from her?"

"Thanks."

rinoa-edea-ultimecia-rinoa-edea-ultimecia, seifer, squall, _kill the beast, drink its blood_.

He is not afraid (he is terrified, a knot growing in his chest, heart wrapped in barbed wire). Ultimecia is dead, Edea has passed her powers, Rinoa is gone from Balamb, and Seifer has no idea what's become of her.

There's no need to be afraid, not anymore.

He eats his pizza in silence for a while, watching Squall rise from his chair to collect another slice, fold it lengthwise and eat it standing. He'd probably pace, if it weren't for some bizarre sense of self-control that Seifer has never been able to master.

It will always come back to witches, won't it?

(two beers remaining.)


	6. property of

**six.**

"He's in bad shape."

"Your professional opinion?"

It's not hard to believe that this guy is Seifer's _father_ , biological or no. There's a cutting edge to Cid's tone sometimes, a keenness honed from years of being around kids and teenagers and surly, violent adults, undoubtedly.

Squall keeps his posture at ease; this is Cid's office, after all. These are business hours. This is his boss first, father-figure second (and Squall guesses he now has a surplus of those, anyway. Not that Laguna really counts.)

If Cid needs him to spy on his son, Squall will do it.

"An observation. You said he was in therapy, right?"

"It's a condition of his release, yes."

Something crosses Cid's face, and he's never been all that hard to read. Squall doesn't care one way or another about being the bearer of bad news, but Seifer's... his friend, he guesses. Someone he's known practically his entire life. It bothers him, a little bit, and it comes out in his voice.

"It's not doing him any good."

 _xx_

They move from drinking expensive beer to cheaper stuff, to vodka that stinks like rubbing alcohol (until Squall thinks he might go blind from it, and switches to water from the tap in a glass that's more or less clean.)

Seifer gets more comfortable the more he drinks, like something in him has settled, eased. Is this what coping actually looks like? It's a curious thing to watch. Squall's never had the pleasure of _coping_.

Garden forced them all into post-war counseling, into new missions, putting dozens of jobs between the team and the witch, keeping them busy, go go go so they don't give into madness. Squall sleeps like the dead, and when he dreams, it's boring, run of the mill stuff that he doesn't remember when he wakes up.

He's moved on, but he's never processed it, just shoved it somewhere deep in his subconscious where he sticks everything he doesn't want to deal with- Rinoa, Laguna, Edea, Ultimecia.

Paperwork, coffee, a pair of sky-blue sleeping pills if he's having an off night, graciously prescribed by Kadowaki. Yeah. _Living the dream, Leonhart._

Seifer is trapped.

 _xx_

"You should just let me put him down, before he goes off the rails again." Xu's remark is casual, and she's disassembling her sidearm even as she says it, rearranging the pieces on a corner of Cid's desk.

 _Why is she even here_?

Squall knows there's a whole story between them, Cid and Xu, there's a reason Xu looks at him with murder in her eyes when she thinks Squall isn't paying attention (and sometimes, even when he is _definitely_ paying attention). Knows it's all to do with the job, and the way he got commander.

He doesn't pry, lets her be pissed, she's a good SeeD and she deserves to have that recognized. But he doesn't have the patience for her bullshit right now. It's probably the hangover. It's _definitely_ the hangover.

"He isn't some goddamned stray dog, Xu. He's a human being."

Her gaze is steady on him as she reassembles the gun, and he knows that her opinion still stands. Cid pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, and sighs.

"Dismissed. Both of you."

 _xx_

Ultimecia snaps his fingers, and he roars like a lion.

One. _Snap_. Scream. Two. _Snap_. Scream. _Three snap scream_ until he's actually teary-eyed from the pain, hand mangled, how the hell is he going to hold a gunblade now, how is he-

She reaches for his other hand.

He begs her not to, and her lips curl like an oil slick. She gets off on his pain, on torturing him, he knows this on some horrific subconscious level, knows it in a primal way- she'd love to shatter him and leave him begging.

He can't run. He's her _knight_. He will not be allowed to betray her. This, this right here? This screaming agony in his hands- _four, snap, scream-_ this is punishment for a cut-off cry of _Leonhart_ -! after Squall took a header off the parade float with a javelin of ice in his chest.

Five, snap, _please stop please please please-_

Six.

He thinks he might pass out, but she rakes her claws across his face.

 _xx_

"Seifer?"

Leonhart's got his hand on his shoulder, shaking him, looking _concerned_ , of all things, and there's nothing that pisses Seifer off faster than pity. _Pity_. From _Leonhart_.

"Get off me," he says, shaking free of the hold, hand wiping across his face, expecting it to come back covered in blood.

It's clean. He exhales, leans back against the wall, realizes there's still a glass in his hand. Seifer drains the dregs, and sends it rolling across the floor, where it bumps against the wall.

"You okay?" Leonhart doesn't quit, does he? "You were out of it for a while, there. I thought I was gonna have to call someone."

 _Probably why he's commander, and I'm a fucking mess._

Seifer is on his feet, and the world swims in a drunken haze. He shoves past Leonhart, shoves away. She's dead, remember, she's dead.

"Stop looking at me like that, I'm _fine_."

Squall doesn't believe him. Seifer doesn't care. This is how he survives.

 _xx_

Xu catches him in the dorm hall, grabbing his arm before Squall can make it all the way back to his dorm.

"Don't let him manipulate you. He might be crazy now, but he's always been good at getting people to do what he wants."

"I'm not stupid, Chang. He's Garden's ward, isn't he? I'm just keeping an eye on Garden's property."

The worst part is, he almost believes that.

It's not like they're _friends_ or anything. Right?


	7. pretensions

_**seven**_ **.**

He's cleaning. Seifer doesn't know why he's doing it, only that he's got a bucket of soapy water, a sponge in his hand, and he can't actually remember the last time the tile of the kitchen has looked anything other than yellow-gray.

Turns out it's white, with a skinny blue border around the edge of each block. He sits back on his heels, sponge soaking through his jeans, and studies it in mild disbelief.

He's drinking, but he's forgetting about it more often than not, the beer sitting half-full on the edge of the counter. There's a bunch of dust making its home underneath the sink. Seifer sweeps it up with a paper towel from the roll, and dumps it in the trash bag that's close to overflowing. It gets knotted off, and he rips another bag from the box (the last one, it turns out, and he pitches the box as well.

He cleans, scrubs, hauls a pile of laundry the size of him down to the washroom in the basement of his building, forgets about it for six hours when he finds a can of paint in a closet that's the color of his walls (or the color they _were,_ once upon a time, anyway.)

Paints and scrubs and dumps the basket of clothes on his bed for the pretense of sorting through it later (does, actually, kind of fold most of it, and stuff it onto empty shelves.) He finds himself pulling button-down shirts from the mess and wrestling them onto hangers, breaking three, duct-taping cheap plastic back together. It looks- normal, almost, when he steps back. Clean.

He was human once. He wonders if this is just pretending at it.

There's a knock on the door.

 _xx_

This is how they survive, Squall supposes, standing there with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets and no absolution in the form of food or drink. Seifer's apartment smells different, even beyond the door- bleach?

He sniffs the air again, just to make sure, in the same second that Almasy opens the door, paint-streaked.

"Christ, you again?" _They are not friends_ , his words remind Squall sharply. They are not, they never have been, what is he even _doing_ here? "The fuck do you want?"

He'd left him, panicked and scared, he'd _left_ , pushed away. Not his problem, never his problem. Left to go run back to Garden and tattle on him like they're kids again and Seifer had tricked him into thinking a cup of mud was chocolate pudding. Squall hunches his shoulders.

"I was in the neighborhood." Disregarding the fact that it takes almost half an hour for him to be _in_ the neighborhood, a car ride from Garden and the walk from the public lot over the cobbled streets. Again. Third time in a week. He would like to use work as an excuse, but for what, Squall doesn't know. "I was gonna grab dinner."

The lie is almost convincing. He doesn't know what the hell he's doing here.

"You want to come? Or are you busy?" Nodding toward the eggshell paint streaks on Seifer's skin.

"I was just doing some shit."

Squall peers around him, into the apartment. It looks like a different place, the little glimpse he gets before Seifer shifts and blocks his view. "Looks good."

"Yeah, well. Whatever."

 _Isn't that my line?_

He turns to leave, turns to leave. This is ridiculous, pushing himself back into Seifer's life like this- it's for _Cid_ , it's on his behalf, _keep an eye out for my boy_. Anyone else would have been a better choice- Quistis. Hell, _Xu_. At least she'd be honest about her intentions.

He remembers Seifer, inhaling half the pizza like he hadn't eaten in months, and shifts again, the hall carpet uncomfortably squishy beneath his boots. "Well?"

Seifer snorts, and steps back from the doorway. "You're a persistent little asshole, aren't you? You buying? Because I've got about five gil in my wallet right now, and unless you're talking about the dollar menu at Wharf Rat-"

Squall has been called worse; his mouth curls up in the briefest half-smile.

"Yeah. My treat."

 _xx_

They go to Siren's, ostentiously a restaurant, really just a bar with pretensions. And burgers, big, fat juicy burgers that Seifer decides he's having two of because it occurs to him with the first whiff of the air inside the place that he's forgotten to _eat_ in his maniacal cleaning spree.

The place is not all that full; he gets the impression that people are looking at him like he's come to eat their children instead. He smiles with too many teeth; it pleases him how quickly people seem to settle up their tabs and leave.

Monster, monster, how big your teeth are.

They are led to a booth on the fringes, near a window with a fantastic view of the fish market's trash-filled alley. Leonhart doesn't notice, or doesn't care, or doesn't feel like starting a fight about it. He's gotten trickier to read over the past couple of years, Seifer thinks. Maybe it's just because they're no longer on Garden's turf.

It makes things interesting, at least.

Seifer picks a beer from the list, adds his two burgers and a heaping pile of fries to the order, and hands over his menu. The waitress takes his order reluctantly, like she's not sure he should be allowed out without a leash, but since the _mighty_ Commander Leonhart's here with him, she can't throw him out without good reason.

Squall orders without looking at the menu- the waitress is _much_ nicer to him.

"Careful, Leonhart, it's like I'm tarnishing your rep."

Squall isn't paying attention, glancing at something on his phone, thumb sliding across the screen- Seifer can't actually remember the last time he'd charged his, or if it even works anymore. He sure as shit doesn't have it on him now, tapping his fingers on the paper placemat as a distraction.

"Hm?"

"This is a nice place," Seifer clarifies, gesturing at their surroundings, at the generic old-world charm, rustic wood, clean tables.

"Oh. Yeah. I come here a lot."

Interesting, interesting. He wouldn't think Leonhart the type to have a regular place to go that isn't the caf or a cup of microwaveable noodles. Seifer's attention travels around the pub; his _thank you_ as the waitress delivers their drinks catches her off-guard, and she nearly upends his in his lap.

Was probably planning to do that, anyway, but his clothes remain clean, and she retreats without malice.

Seifer flicks a paint fleck off his thumbnail, and picks up his pint.

"So, what is this? Did Garden introduce an _adopt a wayward jerk_ program or something?"

"Yeah, every month we draw names out of a hat." Squall's reply is so blandly sincere that Seifer chokes on a mouthful of his beer, coughs hard, and laughs.

It is an unfamiliar sound, and it hangs in the air between them.

 _xx_

Squall will think about that later, lying in bed and staring at the smooth ceiling in the dark. If Seifer had laughed more, or tried harder, or if Squall had made one more joke, would it have turned out like this?

He doesn't know.

He doesn't sleep.


	8. bloodlust

_**eight.**_

It takes two bars and a carefully-crafted insult about someone's mother before Seifer finally gets someone to try to hit him.

It's been burrowing under his skin all night, with every shot he downs, every beer he chugs. Leonhart's paid-for dinner sitting in his stomach still, hours after the commander has been recalled to Garden for some bullshit or another. It's enough of a reason to go out and get drunk, one good beer turning into two, Squall peeling away at the end of the block, phone already to his ear to assess whatever the hell needed assessing that urgently.

Fuck Garden.

He takes someone's fist straight to his cheek, lets the force of it turn his head to the side- let them start it, so he can finish it. The smile that spreads malevolently across his mouth is enough to make his assailant reconsider their actions, even if he _had_ provoked the other guy. The wolf is strong in him tonight, the need to snap his jaws shut around someone else's throat a burning ache inside.

This is what he misses about Garden- he misses _battle_ , glory, _war_.

(He'd had it all, once upon a time, and she'd turned her back on him, dethroned her silver knight, threw him back down to the rabble and the peasants.)

Seifer grabs two handfuls, one of worn denim jacket, the other of close-cropped hair, and body-slams his would-be assailant onto the bar. It feels _good_ , the crack of something or several somethings, the pathetic howl of pain. The way the impact _jars_ up his arms.

"Any of you other fuckers wanna try?" he inquires of the assembled masses, and it's like something out of a movie, the pause before they all charge him at once. He is still, giving them time, giving them the opportunity they all so desperately want- he has killed people, people they know and love, probably. Everyone wants him dead, and that's what makes this so much _fun_.

All his furniture is still sitting in the middle of his living room, paint drying on the walls, and here he is, about to bloody the place up again the second he gets home. Well. No one ever said that Seifer Almasy made the _best_ decisions, did they?

He hurls himself into the fray, drunk enough to feel no pain, gives better than he gets- never underestimate a former SeeD cadet with absolutely nothing left in the world to lose. One day, it's going to end badly, but today isn't going to be that day. He uses his face to break someone's nose, turns himself into a battering ram. Hyperion has always been an extension of himself, but even without his gunblade, he is still violence and fury and death.

" _Almasy!"_

Leonhart's voice, over the crowd- Seifer is pretty sure he's hallucinating it, bloodlust and battle-cries rampant in his veins, but no, there the fucker is, clawing through the crowd. It's a distraction- one Seifer cannot afford, it turns out.

There is a firebrand strike somewhere around his ribs, and Seifer looks down long enough to _assess_ that there's a hunting knife sticking in his guts, and _assesses_ that this may be a bad fucking thing, before some other asshole breaks a bar stool over his head, and he goes down hard, suddenly nerveless fingers pulling away from the knife.

Leonhart's face swims in his vision, and the words, _you moron_ , trip into Seifer's ears, before the lights go out entirely.

 _xx_

He comes to in a hospital bed. Seifer would like to pretend that this is the first time this has happened, but it is neither the first, nor second, nor tenth, and so he just lays there for a while, doped up and breathing antiseptic air, the pillow papery beneath his head, the sheet pulled halfway up his ribs unpleasantly scratchy.

There's the rustling of a newspaper nearby. Seifer assumes maybe that's why he's not handcuffed to the bed. It takes deliberate instructions to his neck to turn that way.

"What? You didn't bring me flowers?" _God_ , it hurts to talk. He presses his hand against what feels like three inches of bandages piled up on his chest, and thinks that if he doesn't sit up now, he's going to remain lying down for the rest of his days. Get the worst of it over with.

Squall flicks down the corner of the paper.

"You shouldn't be moving."

"Shouldn't be doing a lot of shit but- _motherfucker-"_ A low hiss of agony, arm clamped tight around his midsection. There. Done. Upright. Cue the victory fanfare. He hunches in on himself for a long moment, sweat breaking out in a sheen across his face. "Don't they believe in _magic_ here? You got a cure I can borrow?"

Squall ignores his question.

"You're lucky they stitched you up at all, Seifer." He sounds like Trepe, in that bossy way of hers. Squall folds up the newspaper with a minimum of noise, and chucks it on the floor next to him. "You know you technically violated your parole, right?"

"I'm sure I did."

There's a button on his IV line that Seifer knows from personal experience will make him want to lay back down and sleep for a thousand years. He presses it once, just enough to take the edge off, and straightens up as best he can.

"Dammit, this isn't a _joke_ \- the Garden council is looking for _any_ reason to stick you in front of a firing squad, Seifer, and I have spent _months_ convincing them that they don't need to worry about you."

Hard to enjoy the effects of morphine when someone's yelling at you. Seifer raises a brow, and looks Leonhart straight on; he's not going to lie, the use of his _name_ , twice in a row, is making him a tiny bit wary.

"You're actually _angry_ at me? Because some asshole _stabbed me_? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but that seems a little crazy."

" _Because you started it!_ "

Squall's outburst is so _loud_ that both of them stop for a second, staring at each other warily. It is not surprising that the door bursts open and a security guard comes charging in, because god forbid the great _Commander Leonhart_ is in any sort of danger, when they've all been hurling themselves headlong into it since they were eight.

 _xx_

"Get out," Squall snarls, and there is fury in his voice, danger and rage. The guard beats a hasty retreat. They are left alone.

His hands unclench, and he levels a finger at Seifer- stupid, idiotic, _moron_ that he is, wasting Squall's night by having to drag his sorry ass to the clinic five blocks over, Almasy's blood soaking into his clothes.

It's dried into his jeans, into his shirt.

He'd left him alone for _five hours_ , long enough to deal with a crisis in a Galbadian outpost, and apparently five hours was just long enough for Seifer to get drunk and suicidal by barfight. He hadn't been hard to find at all- Balamb only had three bars, and they'd already been to the first one.

"What is your _problem_? Are you _trying_ to get yourself killed?" He doesn't want to know the answer; Seifer is sociopathic on his best days, psychotic on his worst. "Because if you are, tell me so I can get you some _help_."

He's dealt with Seifer being dead once. Squall isn't sure he can deal with it again.


	9. harder to breathe

_nine._

He doesn't sleep. He tosses and turns and wonders if there's any other way this could have ended up, a knife in the guts and three inches from death, Seifer checked out of the hospital against every doctor's advice, even the ones that don't give much of a shit about him, back in his apartment (and Squall had _left_ him there, among his scattered, crappy furniture pulled away from the walls coated in broad, uneven streaks of paint- a drunkard's work. Possibly modern art. He's never been good at this shit.)

It counts, right? That he'd gotten Seifer to his door, into his apartment, Almasy dragging his feet the last few blocks and leaning on Squall heavily, and he might as _well_ be in a drunken stupor rather than drugged up and half-bled out.

It counts.

He says it counts, and he's commander, and that makes it true.

 _What are you, five?_

The voice in his head sounds so much like Almasy that Squall chokes on his toothbrush at the thought, coughs, spits a mouthful of paste into the sink. Rinses, watching it all swirl down the drain, the taste of last night eradicated with a couple minutes' solid brushing. At least some things can be put back together again, and he feels almost human when he finishes his shower.

Xu is waiting for him in the hall outside his office, flicking through some undoubtedly fascinating article on her phone. Squall slugs down the last of his coffee, feeling like his brain is still wrapped in cotton and knowing he's not nearly up to handling whatever she's about to ambush him with.

"Rumor has it he's dead. Another has it that _you_ stabbed him." Of course she knows. Xu knows everything- it's part of her job, keeping her finger on the pulse of the world. But this isn't exactly _news_ , and it's not even... Squall glances at his watch. Not even twelve hours old yet.

"He's not, I didn't, anything else I need to release an official statement on?" He has not had enough coffee for this yet, and beelines for the brewer in the corner. If there's one thing he can do while working on approximately zero hours of sleep, it's make coffee. Especially when it's one of those things with the little pods, and all he has to do is pop it in and hit Brew.

An idiot could do it. Right now, Squall _feels_ like one, as Xu talks and the words just flow in one ear and out the other, PR nonsense neither of them officially have to deal with but it's somehow become part of the job description, a press conference. A _press conference_.

"Seifer started the fight. It's not like people in Balamb are coming after him with pitchforks and torches."

Okay, so he can make coffee, and defend Almasy.

Xu snorts, somehow making it sound _graceful_ as her fingers fly over her phone's screen. "Of course he started it, and of course he deserved it. I'm just trying to figure out why there are thirty-eight stories in various media outlets across the globe wondering why _you_ are holding a- oh, here it is. My favorite line was _, holding a melancholy vigil over his lover's body._ It's from the _Galbadia Guardian_ , before you ask." A trash rag. One of many, in Deling. Scandal and sex all they knew how to peddle. "How does it feel knowing someone tried to make mincemeat of your _lover_?"

She uses the word mockingly. Squall doesn't have the energy to fight her on this.

"If I were sleeping with Almasy, I'm pretty sure he'd crow about it every chance he got, so we all know it's not true, don't we?" They're not even _friends_. They're not anything. He's just trying to fix what went wrong, somewhere way back down the line, and Seifer would be dead in a ditch _months_ ago if someone hadn't stepped in.

He doesn't like caring about people. It gets under his skin, makes his head ache. That might be the no sleep and the stress of life and the _distinct_ lack of coffee in his system talking, though- but it's still true. Squall doesn't care about people. He's a cold, introverted guy; it's easier when people perceive him that way. It gives him space and room to breathe.

(And then Rinoa had to show up and _ruin_ all of that, make him care so much he feels like throwing himself out of his office window at least twelve times a day. But she's in Centra and Seifer isn't, and Squall decides he only has the emotional energy to spend on one of them. He's never been a fan of the long-distance thing.)

Xu doesn't get a cup of coffee, he decides, ejecting the empty pod and tossing it into the wastebasket. Petty. But he's feeling petty lately.

"I'm just keeping an eye on him. You know we would've paid a SeeD to do the same thing."

"Should I expect your contract and bill in the mail, then?"

He really, _really_ doesn't have the energy to deal with _her_ on top of all of this. Her venom and loathing- Seifer killed a lot of her friends. Seifer killed a lot of his _own_ friends during the war. Squall doesn't deny anyone their feelings, but Almasy is pardoned and tracked every second of every day by a task force in the techie haven that the bowels of Garden have become. What more do they want from him?

Squall rubs his forehead, feeling the thick ridge of scar tissue there. "Xu, please. I know you hate him, but can you just... _lay_ _off_ of him?" It's not cold or commanding or angry, it's just _tired_ , and Squall says it without thinking too deeply. "Cid asked me to look after him. That's what I'm doing. I can't control who decides to carry a filleting knife and shove it in Seifer's guts at the first available opportunity-"

"But if you'd seen the person that did it, they would be dead, and we'd be sitting in Interrogation One right now," Xu finishes. She looks a little taken aback at the scolding- there's little that rattles her cage, but Squall has tried so hard not to feed into her dislike of him on an immediate professional level, trying to make the best of a bad situation.

He shrugs, and steps aside with his coffee, slurping from the mug, wishing he had a straw. Or an intravenous line of the stuff straight to his brain- he's pretty sure it doesn't work like that, but Kadowaki deals caffeine pills like candy to any SeeD who knows to ask, and he makes a mental note to stop by the infirmary later.

Xu steps up, reaching past him for one of the few hazelnut flavored pods left, dropping it into his machine and thumbing the brew button. The mug she chooses has a chip on the lip of it, but Squall has the only other clean one, and she'll have to suffer.

God, what is he doing? Turning into _Seifer_? He almost wants to apologize for the intrusive thoughts, but it's not like she can read his mind, and he thinks he's earned the right to be a little bit of a jerk. It's not even working hours yet- there's coffee and informal debriefings and he thinks there's a staff meeting at 0800 he'll skip out on. Maybe he'll just blow off his whole morning, take Dincht for backup and go into the woods for a while. Kill some things, get his mind off of- everything.

He's the commander. He can do that. Right?

(No, not really.)

 _Shut up_ , Squall orders the tiny little voice at the front of his brain. _No one asked you_.

 _xx_

He half-expects Squall to be skulking around his apartment every time he opens his eyes, and Seifer is perpetually surprised to find himself alone each time he wakes up, shuffles like an old man to the bathroom (at one point, he makes it as far as the kitchen, cadging a beer from the fridge and downing two of the painkillers he's been given with a swig of it before Seifer realizes the bottle's gone off and the whole thing is skunked.)

He rinses his mouth out with tepid tap water, then stands there at the sink, watching it swirl down the drain, a hand probing the bandage at his side. Yep. Still hurts. He peels off the filthy one, tossing it in the trash, then turns toward the bathroom. The wound is angry red, pulled shut with precise black stitches- bastard had a bad angle, missed everything important. Asshole. He scrounges up his first aid kit, aware it's mostly empty, but there's a disinfectant healing wipe still wrapped up, and a couple of large bandages that are too big for bloody knuckles. It burns like a _bitch_ when he runs the wipe across his skin, but the potion infused in it flows clean and cold in its wake, and soon the whole thing is numb.

He pitches the trash onto the floor, aiming for the can and missing. Fuck it.

Seifer slaps a bandage over the whole mess, calls it good, and totters back to bed, crashing hard.

When he wakes up next, Leonhart still isn't there.

Seifer doesn't know what he was expecting.

He sinks back into disjointed dreams, where nothing hurts but Ultimecia still waits with a wicked smile on her painted lips, a crook of her finger beckoning him, and Seifer has no choice but to obey.

(He is her knight, after all- always was, always will be.)


	10. icarus

**ten.**

"You look like shit," Leonhart says, stepping into the apartment armed with bags that Seifer regards with narrow-eyed suspicion. That looks a heck of a lot like a grocery run, but Leonhart must have forgotten that Seifer currently has all of four gil in his bank account. Or Squall showed up at the wrong apartment, missed a turn on his way back to Garden.

"Thanks. Are you moving _in_ or something?"

He feels like garbage, but he's not going to give Squall the satisfaction of letting him _know_ that- it's been a day or two, he's not sure. He isn't in any shape to entertain visitors.

Good thing it's just Leonhart.

"Don't take this the wrong way. I sent a cadet to get some groceries, and they came back with more than I can fit in the fridge in my dorm." Lies, easily tripping off Squall's tongue- Seifer wouldn't be surprised if he'd sent that cadet with a specific list.

He takes the bags anyway, digging through them- food and crappy conversation. Is this all they're good for?

"Thanks," he repeats, even if the idea of eating anything other than plain toast makes him want to yak- he's got a suspicion the wound is infected, but he's got a handful of antidotes from the corner store. Five gil's worth of medication- all he can afford right now.

Squall picks out what needs to be cold, and stuffs those things in the bare refrigerator, the chill of it soothing against Seifer's skin.

"When's the last time you actually went to a store?" he asks, and Seifer can't help but notice the meticulous efficiency of Squall's stocking, everything at right angles, arranged in an order that makes sense to him at least. He has no doubts that if he opened Squall's fridge, he'd find the same setup.

It doesn't seem like Squall wants an answer, which is great, because Seifer can't think of anything clever to say. He opens a pack of saltine crackers instead, puts one in his mouth. It sucks the moisture from his tongue.

Seifer chases it with a mouthful of almost-cool beer, blames the temperature of the drink on the storm that threatens outside, watches Squall move around his kitchen like it doesn't bother him to be so familiar.

"If you need money, I can loan you some." Not give, _loan_ \- Seifer acknowledges the choice of words with a shrug. He is not a charity case (kind of is, actually; Garden's paying for everything else, why not his food, too? He might as well move back in the dorms while he's at it.)

"I'm okay."

Squall straightens, and dumps his coat on the back of one of the kitchen chairs, pushing back his hair from his face. His cheeks are red with the cold outside; it's supposed to be a bad storm this time, winter in Balamb coming strange and brutal this year.

They're all blaming time compression, secretly. Even if it failed, Ultimecia gave it the old college try, didn't she? That bitch.

He reaches for the box of beer that Seifer's broken into, and pauses.

"Are you sure you're alright? You look... really bad."

Seifer shoves the rest of the twelve-pack in Leonhart's outstretched hands. "I told you. I feel fine. Tired. You come here for any other reason than to comment on my dashing good looks?"

Squall snorts, turning back to empty the box into the narrow shelves that line the door. Eleven cans of beer look more appealing when they're arranged labels-out; he finds himself more distracted than he would like to admit. He's tired, that's it. Really tired. Exhausted.

Bed actually sounds like a more appealing idea than making idle chit chat. He eats another cracker, has another sip.

The wind picks up outside, howling against the windows with a sudden ferocity. They both turn at the sound, at the storm that has descended. Snow, snow, more snow- Seifer can't wait for the spring, for warmth again. He feels like he'll never be warm at this rate, unless he's drunk.

He meanders from the kitchen to the window, clutching his can.

The snow billows down in great white torrents.

(trabia, cold bright white, trabia blown to bits and pieces.)

"Hey, you wanna watch the game? I hear there's a wicked match between DC and Esthar tonight." He turns away from the snow, offers up an alternative to a trip down memory lane, or six hours lost to dissociation. "Unless you're planning on driving in this shit."

Besides, if there's one thing that works in his apartment, it's the TV- it's the only bill Seifer ever remembers to pay on time. He finds the remote amidst a pile of junk mail, and flops on the couch, wincing at the pull in his side, masking it with a pull of beer.

 _xx_

He's reluctant, suddenly, to cross the room, to sit on that sofa. There are no other seats in the place, unless he drags in a kitchen chair. Squall takes a beer with him- why is it that every time they meet, it's over beer and bullshit?

He'd just come to drop off some food, in the event that Balamb grinds to a standstill with all this _snow_. Unheard of, practically. It's Time Compression, the lunar cry, a thousand snowballing aftereffects of the war. Squall takes his drink, drops onto the sofa, feels it sink beneath him, lumpy like Seifer has used it as a bed more often than not.

The hockey game is loud and raucous in the small space, and everything is very close all of a sudden, every shift Seifer makes on the couch, every rise and fall of the can in his hands. It's hard to focus.

(Seifer has always had that effect on people.)

Squall doesn't realize that his beer can is empty and that he is crushing it between his palms in unfocused distraction until Seifer leans, takes it away from him, tosses it on the floor. His face is very close. Too close.

His lips are warm, when they finally meet.

But then again, Seifer has always burned so brightly.

 _xx_

He doesn't know why he's doing this, doesn't understand it, can't get his head around it. Doesn't know why he's doing this, broad palm grazing along Leonhart's jaw, pulling him closer, pulling him in.

A cheer bursts out from the television speakers, and they break apart, startled.

His fingers dig into the arm of the sofa, cheek grazing Squall's, breath coming more quickly than he would like.

"-Sorry," he exhales. "I don't know why I-"

Squall grabs him, a hand around the back of his neck, pulling Seifer back, lips crushing together, noses banging until they figure out how they _fit,_ a puzzle long unfinished finally falling into place. Leonhart's name sliding from his tongue, a slow exhale.

His shirt disappears at some point, an awkward twist and pull, and it ends up flung halfway across the room, hanging off the edge of the television. He'll find that funny later, Seifer thinks, but Squall runs his mouth along his jaw, and thinking becomes a very distant, very impossible task.

His arms come up along Squall's shoulders, and his hands rake through deep brown hair.

Nothing makes sense anymore, nothing is ever going to be the same after this.

 _ultimecia's claws along his back, her lips at his throat, his hands tangling in silver hair_ -

"-fer? Hey-"

 _xx_

Seifer has frozen, fingers yanking so hard on a handful of Squall's hair he thinks it's going to be torn out, and Squall reaches up, touching Seifer's face.

"Seifer?"

The recoil is instantaneous, Seifer scrambling off the couch, eyes wide, afraid- _petrified_ , breath sucked in too quickly, face ashen. Squall rises slowly, hands out in placation.

"What's wrong?"

( a, the ghost always waiting in the shadows, her laughter ringing hollow in their ears)

He closes the space between them, and Seifer's pulse is jumping in his throat like a hummingbird is trapped beneath his skin. Squall's fingers graze his. Seifer jerks his hand away.

"Get off of me, don't touch me... _don't touch me!"_

"Seifer- it's not real, she's not real-" He sounds like an idiot, like Rinoa trying to calm Angelo during a thunderstorm; Seifer is a cowering dog, and all he can offer is a babbling stream of nonsense. "Look at me, okay? It's just us. It's just me."

 _If I were sleeping with Almasy, don't you think he'd be crowing about it?_

"Calm down, alright? Breathe. Deep breaths. C'mon-"

 _xx_

Seifer can't breathe. He can't. He can't. He can't. He can't.

The world gets strange, unfocused, unreal. Ultimecia reaches for him, Squall reaches for him, claws wrap around his wrist, wings beat in his ears, a hundred ravens taking flight at once. No, _no_ , no, this isn't real this isn't real this -

 _Seifer!_

 _I don't want to die_ , he thinks, but the thought is very, very dim, a candle flickering its last flashes of light. Ultimecia's fingers reach for that little thought, that tiny flame.

She snuffs it out.


	11. the boy king

**eleven**.

It takes a crew of four, wasted resources, Xu would say, but luckily for all of them, there's a job that requires her personal attention in Deling for a few days, and she's not here to comment on the medical team barreling through a blizzard in one of Garden's vehicles, all bundled in Garden blue winter parkas.

There are questions on everyone's lips, but Squall is mute in response. It figures. It _figures._

Seifer's hand is very cold, hanging off the edge of the gurney, and Squall withdraws his touch, bumped out of the way by a medic reaching across him.

There's a hypodermic, full of glowing white. It looks holy, unreal- artifice and science. "Hold him steady," one of the medics instructs as the van bounces over Balamb's rough roads. The stick is clean. The hypo empties beneath Seifer's wax-pale skin.

 _If you die, I'm bringing you back and kicking your ass myself._

 _xx_

Someone sticks him with a needle. Ultimecia screams in his head, vengeful, vicious words- _mine mine mine mine mmmmmine-_

He is so tired of being ( d.)

 _xx_

They have to shock him, when his heart stops, and the hair on Squall's arms all stand up on end. He feels a tingling in his teeth.

Is he- is he-?

He can't get the words out.

 _xx_

Flash.

Trabia explodes in a nuclear bright blast.

A bright light in his eye, Kadowaki's voice coming from very far away. He's missed that old bird.

But Ultimecia takes his arm when he reaches out to touch someone, to let them know he is still here, and drags him away.

 _No!_

 _xx_

"He was injured recently-" Squall begins, but Kadowaki finds the site before he can finish the sentence, peeling away the bandages. Something has gone wrong; the stench is immediate and pervasive, like the docks at ten in the morning when the fishermen have returned to gut and sell their wares.

Kadowaki pulls a filter mask over her face, pulls blue latex gloves over her aging hands.

"Infection. Whomever stuck him used a dirty knife. You may want to leave, Squall."

He stays, defiant of her rule over the infirmary, abusing his power. She orders him off to a corner, and chucks a mask at him. Seifer is all motion and grace and violence- he's too still, too still. This is not being beaten over the head with a barstool, this isn't drunken sleep.

 _If you want to die that badly, tell me._

Seifer had scoffed and snorted and told him to fuck off.

He's too still.

One of the medics rigs a bag of antidote, pure, unfiltered, expensive stuff, mint-green that seeps down thick through the line. The room smells like toothpaste on a thousand-fold scale; Squall breathes shallowly through his mouth, but it doesn't help.

Old stitches are dug out, tissue that has failed to scar over excised, sick-dark around the edges. Kadowaki puts in a request that whomever stitched him together in the first place ought to be fired and barred from medical practice.

Or Seifer is an idiot and can't be trusted with something as simple as a course of antibiotics- vodka may be sterilizing, but it's not a cure-all. Squall doesn't know whether to laugh or scream- only Seifer could cheat death as often as he has and be taken down by a little bacteria.

The stink of infection lingers in the air long after she has scrubbed out.

Seifer still doesn't wake up.

 _xx_

Flash.

Ultimecia, malevolent and mighty, cackling from atop her gilded throne, Seifer bloodied and discarded. He spits a mouthful of red onto the marble floor, and relishes in how it gleams against the white.

The clank of armor, a knight in all his glory, cape streaming scarlet from his shoulders. Ultimecia's pleasure at the havoc he wreaks everywhere they go- he is her general, her right hand. He is her _knight_.

Trabia again, again, the repeat of it an endless loop. Seifer watches the second volley cross the sky, scream past the moon, angels on a mission of mercy- _this is for their own good_ , he thinks, and doesn't know where the thought came from.

(of all the things he has done, trabia is the one he regrets the most)

Fujin, begging him- _please come back, please-_

Ultimecia, severing his strings, limbs dropping useless to his sides- _no wait please come back I'll be good, I'll be good-_

Dark hair, his mother's voice-

Poor, sweet boy.

 _xx_

They put him in an empty dorm room, because it's not the infirmary, and the door locks. Squall sits in the hard plastic desk chair, and stares hard at Seifer's face, trying to read what lurks behind his screwed-tight eyes. He is dreaming, he is afraid.

Kadowaki comes in every few hours to change out the IV bag, to check the wound, to dope Seifer deep into dreamland slumber while she works. It's easier, when he's not given the chance to thrash around.

The skin around the cut has faded from vicious red to angry pink. A good sign. Healing. The air smells like nothing in here, clean and filtered.

"If we can pull him through this fever, he should be okay," she says, and he focuses far too hard on that _should_ word lurking in the middle of Kadowaki's promise.

Seifer is never going to be okay. Never. Never.

 _xx_

Edea walks away, walks away, feathers streaming from the collar of her gown- he has followed her here, through hell- _kome with me, child, to a place of no return_ \- because she needs him, she has always needed him. She walks away.

 _I'll be good, mother, I'll be good-_

 _pathetik boy._

The cruelty rings in his ears long after she is gone.

It is not his mother, it is not his mother.

 _xx_

Xu brings him a meal at one point, a wrapped sandwich, a bag of chips, a bottle of water, a cup of coffee. He stands to answer the door, and stumbles, legs numb from (how many hours) of sitting. Squall's shin slams into the desk as he moves, and he swears as he thumbs the unlock button.

"How's he doing?" she asks, and there's something in her eyes that Squall doesn't understand. Why does she _care_?

Doesn't she hate him?

(seifer's hand in his hair, his pulse under squall's mouth- he can't make anything fit. he can't. he doesn't understand. someone help him. _someone help me_.)

It's too much to think about; he chooses to take Xu's words at their superficial face value instead, because thinking too deeply about anything right now makes him want to resort to being seventeen again, curled up in his bunk, confused, adrift.

(in the end, you're on your own.)

He shrugs, and unwraps the sandwich, preoccupying himself with the act of eating, but it tastes of ashes on his tongue.

Xu leaves. The silence persists.

 _xx_

Flash.

He vomits again, again, again, and there is nothing left to come up. Someone's hand is on his back, their touch a frozen brand, and his reflection in the metal pan he pukes in is distorted, ferocious.

Flash.

Leonhart's voice. _Seifer- hey. Can you hear me?_

A hand in his. He pushes his fingers closed around it.

(i don't want to die)

Flash.

Seifer wakes up with a start to absolute darkness.


	12. when the sun hits our skin

**twelve.**

Rinoa is humming.

He can't place the song, but it doesn't matter- when she's humming, she's happy, she's _herself_. There's no witch-blood staging insurrection in her veins; she's not off in a different universe altogether, one where she doesn't speak, doesn't sleep, eyes fixed on some far-distant point. A universe of her own creation, where in reality, he has to lock her in the dorm just to keep her from wandering off and drowning herself in the ocean (it happens twice before he convinces himself it's not denying her her _freedom_ , it's not her father's influence, it's necessary for her own safety.)

There's work to be done, but Squall slips up behind her anyway, arms around her waist and a kiss against the soft curve of her cheek. "Make any of that for me?" he inquires, inhaling the scent of the spice-laden omelet. She's a sucker for food that would make any normal person's sinuses implode- his tolerance is higher than it used to be. The stuff offered in the caf is bland on his tongue in comparison.

Rinoa deftly slices it in half, and scoops one part onto a plate for him.

"Of course I did. I'm not some kind of monster. There's coffee, too."

 _I love you_. He doesn't have to say it; it thrums through the bond between them, and he takes his plate, fills a mug. Early morning sunlight filters in through the curtains and blinds she's thrown wide open, fresh air comes through the raised windows.

He sits. She sits, her placemat empty of all but a mug of black tea, the scent of bergamot wafting gently from it. Rinoa adds a splash of cream, and leaves the carton open.

He gets distracted by the stirring of her spoon, round and round and round it goes.

"Not hungry?" he asks.

"It's not done yet." There's something strange about her answer- if it's not done yet, what is he eating? Squall slices off a chunk of his omelet. It's done, yellow and what he expected the flavors to be, tiny fires on his tastebuds that he extinguishes with a mouthful of coffee.

There's work to be done. He's late, Squall realizes, looking up at the clock on the wall.

"You don't have to go," Rinoa tells him, reaching across to take his hand. There's something burning in the room- the pan she's left on the stove is smoking. Squall tries to go, to turn it off before it can catch fire, but her grip is iron-strong, and she keeps him rooted to his seat.

"Rin-"

"It's fine. Nothing's going to happen."

It's not fine.

He looks at her, feels the reassurance emanating from her, insistent that it's _fine._ It's not, though, it's not- Squall can't break her gaze, hears the crackling of fire bursting alive. "Rin, I have to-"

"No. You need to listen to me."

Her nails, digging crescents into his skin. When he looks down, his blood bleeds black all over the table.

 _I'm not some kind of monster_.

"Rin, let me go-"

Her face, serene. Her eyes, frantic, afraid. "Squall, I can't hold her back- you have to stay, you have to _stay with him_ , _don't let her get him_ -"

What are you talking about, what are you saying?

"Seifer?" But why? How does she- she's in _Centra_. How can she know anything that's going on? The flames spread from the stove to the counter to the floor, licking up their legs. "Rinoa, what's going on?"

His skin bubbles and peels from his hand, her nails dig into the underlying tissue, veins, bone, her eyes melt, and where they once were, there is stardust.

" _Save him_ ," Rinoa begs with lips that peel back from her teeth- she is a grinning skull in minutes, a pile of ashes the next.

The smoke detector screams him awake.

Squall hits the ground with a thud and a yell, and someone is in the room with him. There's a beeping, a long, insistent tone. He can't make out the shape in the darkness, until the bedside lamp is turned on.

Seifer, crouched next to him, unearthly in the dim glow, concern etched in his features.

"You okay?" he asks. It's the most absurd thing Squall has heard in days, and he laughs, horrified and strangled, pulling himself up against the nightstand, hands dragging down his face. Is he _okay_?

Who knows anymore?

"I'm fine. Bad dream," he lies, and pushes back his hair, looking up at Seifer, scrutinizing him. "You're awake," Squall adds unnecessarily, and wonders why it took him this long to be surprised by it.

"It would seem so. How long was I out?"

Seifer is still too close to him, sitting back on his heels. It takes a great deal of effort not to reach out, draw him in. Check his touchstones of reality. Squall shrugs, digging into his pocket for the hard rectangle of his phone.

The battery is dead, and he chucks it up onto the bed. "A couple of days, I think. Kadowaki was talking about air-lifting you to the hospital on the other side of the island, but I guess that's not necessary now."

A couple of days.

Squall reaches out hesitantly, and presses his palm against Seifer's forehead. There's no flinch, but an absolute stillness at the touch from Seifer. He feels normal- no longer like touching the _sun_. His hand pulls back.

"You look better."

 _Don't touch me don't fucking come near me-_

"Kadowaki says it was an infection. You're gonna have a bigger scar." _Shut up, Leonhart_ , he orders himself, but the stillness in the room needs filling, otherwise, he's going to think about Rinoa's skin peeling from her face, and he doesn't know if he can handle that. "Do you feel okay?"

A quiet assessment, Seifer rolling his head on his shoulders, shaking out his arms, touching the fresh lump of bandages at his abdomen. "I guess. Yeah. Starving, though."

That's something he can _do_ , a problem Squall can fix. He itches to call Rinoa, dial the orphanage's number and speak to her- the dream lingers, _save him, don't let her get him_. That part of him he's never been able to shut off, that residual bond between sorceress and knight, stubbornly insists it's not a dream. Not really. Rinoa, delivering a message the most efficient way she can think of- he wonders if Ellone is on the cape with them.

That tiny coven, three witches by the sea.

"I can go to the caf, grab you something. You should probably stay here, though. Take a shower or something." Seifer roaming the halls of a place where ninety percent of the faculty wants him dead is probably not the most ideal scenario. "I can get you some clothes or something."

Seifer snorts, plucking at the thin dark blue infirmary gown Squall had been enlisted to help wrangle him into. "What? This isn't a good look for me? I kinda like it. Nice, healthy breeze and all that."

Rolling his eyes, Squall turns away, heading for the door. "I'm pretty sure your bare ass would cause another incident. I don't feel like dealing with the paperwork."

"Hey, I have a _great_ ass, thanks."

"Right."

 _xx_

It takes more energy than Seifer cares to admit to strip naked and shower, but once he's under the barrage of hot water, he doesn't _ever_ want to leave it, and tries very hard not to until it runs out and he's suddenly under a frigid waterfall. He does a hasty job with a bar of soap that he found in the little toiletries kit someone has left behind, missed by the janitorial staff when they swept the place between occupants. There's a razor in there, but he doesn't trust himself to shave off the start of a decent beard growing along his jaw without slicing his own throat open. His hands shake enough when he reaches for the towel.

(the witch the witch the witch)

"Fuck off," he snarls at his subconscious, trying to push that dream right back in his face. Ultimecia, reaching for him, breaking him apart. Will he have to relive that every goddamned time he closes his eyes?

But, it seems, he's slipped her hold once again, standing on his own two feet and feeling better than he has since right before some asshole shanked him with a filthy blade. It's progress. It counts.

(the witch the witch the witch)

Seifer brushes his teeth with the tiny pink toothbrush and a glob of vaguely minty paste, and feels less like he swallowed the entirety of the Centran desert afterward.

(the witch the witch the witch)

When he peels away the bandage, there is a thick rope of fresh-healing scar tissue there, instead of the marching line of black stitches on a furious red patch of skin he's come to expect. _Someone_ wasted some magic on him- he'll have to thank Kadowaki later. It looks like she's bombed him with at least three Curagas. He tosses the bandage in the garbage, and doesn't bother recovering it. Nothing's leaking, at least, and it's not like he has another one.

The towel goes around his waist. He drags himself out of the bathroom, and settles on the narrow sofa, flicking on the television to the first vaguely interesting thing he finds. He doesn't remember falling asleep, only that what seems like moments later, Squall is gently shaking him awake.

Clothes, breakfast. Leonhart's even brought a bag of coffee from somewhere, and brews an entire pot. He could get used to this kind of service.

"We need to go to Centra," Squall tells him, when Seifer is halfway through his third cup of coffee.

(the witch the witch the witch)

Seifer knows the answer, but asks the question anyway. "Why?"


	13. together

_note_ : nsfw content in this chapter. just a heads up.

* * *

 **thirteen.**

He doesn't like travelling.

Okay, it's not that he doesn't _like_ travelling. It's that he's not comfortable being off Balamb soil for the first time in two years. Centra's sun hangs heavy and hot in the sky, and he's already sweating like a pig, the drink or three he'd bought on the ferry reeking through his skin.

He doesn't like _Centra_ , because it's coming home, and there's magic here, too familiar, calling to the stuff that beats in his blood. It buzzes insistent in his brain, dances along his teeth and tongue.

Centra is old magic, old gods.

Seifer steps down the last few feet of the ramp, and finds Squall a dozen feet away, the sour expression on his face meaning only one thing- they've arrived too late to rent a car, and their strange flight south to the Cape of Good Hope has been stalled out. No one _walks_ across the desert, not if they want to live.

If the monsters don't get you, the broiling sun will.

"Now what?" He stops a couple feet short, and looks down at Squall through dark-tinted sunglasses.

"We find an inn, I guess. They don't open again until nine tomorrow."

He seems less pissed about this than Seifer thought he would be, but Leonhart's always been good at shoving away his feelings and dealing with them _never_.

"Fantastic. Any chance you feel like footing the bill for dinner somewhere? I'm starving."

"You could've eaten on the boat."

"I had a liquid lunch."

Squall makes a noise of distaste, and pulls out his phone, flicking through screens until he finds what he's looking for- a map of the area, when Seifer glances over his shoulder at it. "The nearest hotel is three blocks that way. They have a restaurant."

"After you, then." He likes Centran food, at the very least, if nothing else about this continent is appealing. Anything to get the taste of magic out of his mouth, anything to get the strangely terrifying prospect of visiting the _orphanage_ out of his brain. Seifer gestures grandly to the emptying street, everyone who had gotten off the boat with them dispersed to home or taxi or points unknown.

They're not the strangest people to ever find themselves in Centra, after all. It's weird, though. He's not recognized here, not on the level of Balamb, where eyes follow him no matter where he goes. Maybe it's the glasses, or the baseball cap pulled low over his brow, obscuring the signature blond and the scar.

Either way, it's _weird_.

Squall springs for a room with two beds, and shrugs when Seifer asks if he's just cheap, or hoping to get lucky- he's certainly not forgotten what Leonhart's mouth feels like on his. "We're only going to be here one night."

Cheap. Definitely cheap. Maybe a little of the latter, too, though- he's hard to read. Seifer chucks his bag next to one of the beds, and tosses himself on it, feeling the dull ache of the wound in his gut pull as he impacts with the mattress.

"Like sleeping on rocks," he pronounces, punching a pillow into submission beneath his head. "I would expect nothing less from a fifty-gil a night motel, though."

He hopes for a rise out of Squall, a laugh. Something to break the tension between them, to ease the perpetual scowl that's been on Squall's face for the past few days. He gets nothing, and shrugs instead, best as he can lying on his back.

The mattress bows again, and Seifer opens his eyes. Squall's sat himself down on the edge of it, looking at the ugly art on the wall.

"You're right. Rocks."

"Told you."

Silence again, and Seifer pushes himself upright. Squall is _hard_ to read, but not impossible, and Seifer's known him since they were three. That's a long time to learn about a person.

"Hey."

Squall's head tilts the tiniest bit, the tension evident in his jaw.

Great, he's paying attention, and Seifer has forgotten what he was going to say. "Listen. Whatever this... thing is, whatever you think Rinoa is trying to tell you- Don't think the worst. You killed the bitch. She's not coming back."

It sounds like hollow bullshit coming from him, of all people- Seifer's perpetual nightmares, and most of his waking moments, are spent in company of _what if_ scenarios, most of which involve Ultimecia tearing him to tiny shreds. But she's dead.

She has to be.

The magic itches beneath his fingers.

Squall exhales, and his shoulders slump, and Seifer doesn't know why he does it- it's not like he cares, it's not like they're anything at all. He lets a hand rake over Squall's shoulder, a brief squeeze- solidarity. Nothing more.

 _xx_

It's been six months since the lump in his chest that he thinks might still be a heart did anything more than the bare minimum of work to keep him upright, alive. It trips over itself now, with the grip on his arm, and the subsequent ache of its release.

His own hand comes up, catches Seifer's before it can drop fully away. It's not the first time Seifer's fingers have been twined in his own, but the last time was when he was _unconscious_ , and Squall hardly thinks that counts.

He studies their hands now, one broad, long-fingered, a musician's hand if he's ever seen one. His own, a few shades paler, thanks to all the time he spends indoors as of late, trapped behind a desk. Calluses in the same places, skin toughened wrapped around gunblade hilts. Seifer's thumbnail is picked ragged. Squall has a scar across the back of three out of the four digits, where he'd caught Quistis' whip in a misguided training battle.

"I know. I'm just."

Just-

"She said she can't hold her back." There are too many women in that sentence alone, and he can feel Seifer next to him, picking over it and putting names to pronouns. "She was afraid."

The fear was real, so genuine he can recall it now, and his grip tightens.

"Oh."

 _xx_

He doesn't know what to do with this development, with Leonhart holding his goddamned hand like a teenage girl. He certainly doesn't know what to do with the fact that he would prefer that Squall _not_ let go.

Seifer has always been able to fall gracelessly into things, rolls in the proverbial hay, relationships that burned hot for a summer and cooled the second the fall semester started. He doesn't know how to do _this_.

What are a few kisses fueled with liquor? It means nothing.

He doesn't even know if he can stand being touched for very long, unless it's something like this.

They can chase demons and ghosts all they want, and they'll still just be a couple of knights, burning too brightly too fast, left smoking shells of themselves. That's all it is- a couple of monsters, murderers of the highest order.

Neither of their hands are clean.

He wants a drink, wants one so badly he thinks he'll vomit from the lack of it, and instead turns. noses along Squall's temple. (Imagines doing it to Rinoa, this same motion when she was distraught over something stupid, a consoling kiss along her brow).

Rinoa will always be between them.

"If she isn't dead," he says, and it comes out quietly. "We'll take her down again."

For a second, there's a glint of something in Squall's storm-grey eyes. Belief. Hope.

Seifer gathers up all the bravado he can find left in his bones, and pulls Leonhart down onto the lumpy mattress. The room is quiet, the sun filters in through the dusty blinds. He doesn't like stillness, doesn't like silence.

When you move, the monsters can't get you.

Squall stops him at one point, pushes him back and studies his face. "You're not going to-"

"I dunno." Lose his shit? Probably. It's been a long fucking time since he's touched anyone that wasn't himself in the shower for a quick jerk. "We'll see."

He has always been a fan of reckless chances. Seifer seizes this one.

This has been far too long coming, the impossible ways they fit together, the moment where Squall picks up his own courage and pins Seifer to the mattress, teeth tugging at his throat. The feeling of skin beneath his palms, Leonhart all leonine muscle beneath his shirt.

It's not a surprise, but it's pleasant to behold. Seifer does a _lot_ of beholding, the arc of Squall's neck, the trail of deep brown hair descending. The fumble of Squall's hands at his own belt, the murmured obscenities and apologies. The rustle of jeans as they are kicked off, two pairs on the floor in quick succession.

Seifer's breath hitches in his throat as Squall's hand brushes his groin on the way back up to tangle in his hair. " _God_ , Leonhart-"

Trying to distance himself, make this last. Keep himself _here_ , and not blanked out and gone.

"Sorry-"

"Don't fucking apologize." It comes out a growl, ferocious, the wolf rearing its head at last- he feels like the old Seifer for a split-second, and tries desperately to hold onto that.

Any pretense of him _not_ wanting to fuck Leonhart into next week disappears.

Is this coping? What would his shrink say, if Seifer told him about _this_? He doesn't cope. He doesn't deal. He feels- feels so intensely Seifer thinks he's going to explode with it. Settles instead for crushing his mouth against Squall's, pushing his hand down the front of grey shorts.

Squall inhales sharply, hips bucking off the bed at the abrupt contact, clawing at Seifer's back. It pleases him, the violence in the reaction, and Seifer strokes again, feeling nails dig into the nape of his neck.

He's going to go with that, that he's doing something right- he's not _completely_ inexperienced here, but it's been... well. It's been a long goddamned time.

Leonhart holds out longer than he would have thought, as tightly wound as he is.

 _xx_

"Shit, _shit- Seifer_ -" Desperation in his voice, noiseless for the next few syllables, until he drops back against the bed and has to lay there for a minute just to figure out where he is, what _century_ he's in anymore.

He _feels_ Seifer's smirk, face buried in his throat. Squall shoves him away, too hot all of a sudden, sweat beading clammy on his skin.

Asshole.

He doesn't know what he's doing here.

 _You have to save him_.

Rinoa's smile, decaying waxwork. But it's gone too quickly for Squall to focus on; instead, he flexes his fingers in the sheets, breathes deeply.

What the hell is he supposed to say now?


	14. no quarter

**fourteen.**

They don't share a bed. In fact, Squall doesn't sleep at all (Seifer, despite his earlier proclamation, sleeps like the dead, face first in a pillow balled up beneath his head.)

He looks innocent like that, relaxed. Squall has seen him unconscious so many times in the past few weeks that it shouldn't be surprising anymore, but then he remembers that he's never seen Seifer just _sleep_. He's seen him knocked out with magic, knocked out with drugs, knocked out with booze.

But never just... asleep. Like a normal person. No wonder it's jarring.

Squall averts his gaze, back out to the still middle of the night of Centra, no one on the streets and if he leans out the window and looks to the left, he can see the far, far distant consistent flash of the lighthouse at the cape.

It has been six months, three days, and change. He would like to not remember how long it's been since he's seen Rinoa, but there it is, the number as obvious as if it's lit up in neon in front of him.

She's gone, and here he is, chasing her down again. Will he ever stop having to _chase_ her?

Rinoa doesn't want him.

He doesn't want her.

They don't fit together seamlessly anymore, not like they were when they were seventeen. Two years spent trying to make it work, sharing his dorm and Rinoa's decorating touches still evident everywhere, only because Squall goes home long enough to shower and sleep and change most days, and spends his weekends elsewhere. Seifer's place. On missions to cities that he doesn't care to remember the names of.

Six months, three days. Some-odd hours and minutes and seconds and milliseconds and the tick tock tick of _eternity_ , stretching out a thousand miles before him, that endless barren grey expanse of nothing, (the field where he died).

He's asked Edea to keep him updated, if anything were to happen.

No news is good news, right?

But something is wrong, and he can feel it bone-deep, something is _wrong_.

"Shut the curtain," Seifer mumbles, shifting in his bed, throwing his arm across his eyes. "Fucking moon."

He doesn't want anyone, not Rinoa, not Seifer, not this pull in his gut that leads him one direction and the tug of his heart that sends him in another completely. He didn't ask for _any_ of this. He wants to be seventeen, on the eve of his SeeD exam with little to worry about than the still-healing skin between his eyes and Quistis' awkward flirtation.

Life was easy.

 _That's bullshit. Life is never easy_.

He shuts the curtains with more force than is strictly necessary. Drops onto the edge of his bed, and looks at the moonlight still slipping through the tiniest space between, casting a gleam of quicksilver on the floor.

 _We have to go to Centra_.

He could be full of shit. There could be nothing wrong with Rinoa at all, and something in their bond is manifesting as fear and danger. He should have called. Spoken to her directly. Spoken to Edea, to Ellone. Someone. Anyone.

Someone who could have talked him out of this wild flight, buying a pair of train tickets and ferry passes and renting a goddamned hotel room in the middle of a Centran port town with creaky, hard mattresses.

He should have listened to Xu and had Seifer put in front of a firing squad at the end of the trial.

Squall looks at his hands, spread helplessly on his knees, and thinks he should have done a lot of things differently.

So much should be different.

He should have stayed dead.

A hand strays to his chest, to the flesh above his heart, unconsciously feeling for a gaping wound that isn't there, the sorceress' ice lance buried deep. The fall from a parade float, the way her face never did anything but sneer- _Matron!_

Seifer, lunging toward him, Rinoa desperate in her reach.

Stardust and memories, that's all it is. A nightmare he can sweep under the rug.

There's no scar. If he tries _really_ hard, maybe he can pretend it never happened at all. The mattress creaks when he flops back on it, a heavy thud against the pillows and the still stretched-taut bedspread. Seifer makes a noise, rolls over, feigns sleep so well it's easy to believe he's really out again, like he wouldn't be instantly alert if Squall did so much as sigh.

What is even happening here? How did they get to this point, from apology pizza and beer to blood spilled to nightmares to naked, to overwhelming desire? Not to mention, afterward, with the worst urge to push him out the nearest window.

 _Don't get too close_ , Xu had warned him.

 _Why is she always right about everything?_

His brow furrows.

He doesn't like this. He doesn't like the way everything seems hurtling toward an inevitability, a headlong crash like he and Rinoa had that first time- _you must be the squad leader,_ she had said with a smile that inched toward impish, and before he knew it, he'd been saving her from the void of space, because without her, he didn't know how he was supposed to _exist._

He doesn't like it now, finding himself more often than not knocking on Seifer's door because he _cares_ , because he wants to make sure he's alive. Because one day, he's going to knock, and there's going to be a corpse on the sofa, drunk to death, and maybe, just maybe, if he _tries_ hard enough, Squall can save him from that.

He's so tired of saving people.

Something prompts him to get up again, pacing the six inches of carpet between dresser and bed, and he chooses to drop again, sitting on the edge of the bed that is not his, Seifer immediately turning toward the motion. "You never answered my question, you know," he says into the darkness, because damned if this asshole isn't awake.

"Which one?" Mumbled into a pillow, but at least he's abandoned the pretense of slumber.

"Whether or not you really wanted to die."

Silence, stillness. Somewhere outside a coyote cries mournfully. It makes the hair on the back of Squall's neck stand up, sends a shudder down his spine. Liminal spaces- time compression, everywhere he looks, the world wrong at the edges of his vision.

This is what he gets for leaving his sleeping pills back in the bedside drawer of his room at Garden.

"-Seifer?"

Seifer's voice, irritable: "I don't know.. It'd certainly be easier. Go to sleep, Leonhart, you're losing it."

"I'm not the crazy one here." Maybe he is. Maybe he's just lying to himself. Who knows? Squall picks at the rumpled fabric of the comforter that Seifer has deigned to only fling over his backside, leaving a large swath of it unused. "That's still not an answer, by the way."

"You asked. I answered. It counts."

"Not really."

A grunt, and Seifer's arm snakes around his waist, yanks him backwards toward an empty stretch of pillow and mattress. The gesture is so unexpected that Squall has no choice but to comply with the fall, landing half on Seifer, half off the bed entirely. "Go to _sleep_. You can psychoanalyze me in the morning, if you want. I'm too tired for this."

"Let me go, then, so I can."

Seifer doesn't respond, just keeps his arm wrapped around Squall's waist, and he has no choice, none at all- he shifts himself into a more comfortable position, finds himself wrapped up in arms that are not Rinoa's, finds Seifer's head nestling against his shoulder.

(No choice. None. Seifer has never given him any quarter, and Squall doesn't expect him to start now.)

He doesn't sleep. Seifer does, and doesn't move for the rest of the night.


	15. by the sea by the sea

**fifteen.**

Rinoa drifts toward him, a hand outstretched- _save me_ , she breathes, but he grabs her arm instead, leaves a handprint in his wake, bruises like constellations blossoming on her skin, hurls her to Adel.

 _Seifer!_ -

He wakes with a start, and the artificial darkness of the room is stubborn and suffocating around him. Seifer closes his eyes again, screws them shut, opens them to dawn filtering in through a crack in the curtains, and the sound of a heartbeat beneath his ear.

"You okay?"

Squall, looking down at him curiously- Seifer doesn't remember this happening, and then does. It makes it easier to breathe, knowing he inflicted this closeness upon himself- still, he pushes himself up, scrubs the crud from his eyes.

"-Yeah."

One day, he's going to be honest with Leonhart again, but today isn't that day, and this moment certainly isn't that moment. He looks back at Squall, at the battered case of his phone in his hand. "Did I wake you up?"

"No."

Well, it's certainly a morning for monosyllabic answers, isn't it? He shrugs, stands, pads bare-assed to the bathroom to take care of business. Emerges cleaner, slightly less naked by way of a towel. Leonhart is already dressed, finishing up a phone call.

"Rental agency has a car waiting for us."

"Great."

He fishes out a t-shirt from his bag, the oldest known pair of cut-offs in the known universe, an ancient pair of jeans that the knees had disintegrated out of and now hit only an inch or so above his kneecaps. They technically count as clothes. He stuffs his wallet in one back pocket and fastens his watch around his wrist.

"Nice beard," Squall comments, sliding past him for the door, and he might be hallucinating it, but Seifer thinks he's smiling when he says it. Or he's snapped. He scrubs his hand along the offending scruff, and slings the strap of his bag over his shoulder.

"I think it makes me look distinguished."

Squall _definitely_ snorts at that. They leave the room behind them, grab overpriced crappy coffee and cling-film wrapped muffins from the cafe adjacent to the lobby for breakfast, and when Squall dozes while waiting in line to pick up the keys for the rental car, Seifer snatches them before Leonhart can.

"You'll crash and kill us all," he reasons, tossing his duffel in the backseat and reaching to move the driver's seat back before he can get in and find himself with his knees jammed up under the dashboard. Better.

"Wake me up in a couple of hours," Squall orders, like Seifer is under his command at _all_. "I'll do the last leg."

"Sure, whatever."

He's had the best sleep he's had in _months_ , and that includes the near coma he was in from almost dying last week. Squall, however, buckles his seatbelt, flips his sunglasses down over his eyes, and is out in seconds. It looks genuine, too, even as the car bumps from reasonably well-maintained town streets to the long stretch of winding, rocky highway that lays before them.

He doesn't wake up Squall, until there's a woman in red standing in the middle of the turnoff leading to the orphanage, gold eyes and black claws, beckoning him onward, onward- come _closer_ , little boy, she says with her throat slit like a second smile, blood caking her chest and blending with the dress she still wears.

Seifer screams, slams on the brakes, yanking the wheel frantically to the left, whatever zen he'd achieved by the quiet and the solitude of the drive, the blast of the AC and Squall's even, deep breaths _gone_.

His vision fills with black feathers and inky laughter, golden eyes meeting his as claws reach to pluck them from his head. The rush of the desert, the beating of his heartbeat in his chest and the rumble of the tires fighting for traction echoing in his bones.

They impact. They stop. His scream fades to a whimper and a gasp, knuckles bone-white on the wheel.

 _xx_

He sleeps on the drive to the orphanage, which takes place in a battered SUV that has seen better days, running roughshod over ill-maintained Centran roads. Sleeps _hard_ , the lack of it the night before slamming down like a wall on his consciousness five minutes after Seifer starts the engine and pulls out of the rental parking lot.

He dreams of things he doesn't understand, gray shifting pictures, Rinoa's face. The sea, crashing endlessly on a barren shore. Edea, bent knees and reaching for him like he is a child again.

They are not unpleasant dreams; merely strange, hard to define. He won't remember them when he wakes up, he thinks.

Squall is unconscious until the brakes scream, Seifer cries out, the car swerves and dives off the edge of the road, hurtling itself down a brief incline, and for a sick, desperate second, Squall thinks the whole thing is going to roll, and that this is how they're going to finally die.

There's a warren of cacti, six or seven of them growing in a tight group, and they slam into it, decapitating two, the rest crunching and jamming beneath the car. It's an effective set of brakes.

Smoke exhales from the hood of the car.

Squall lets go of his iron grip on the dashboard. Well. He's certainly awake now, turning his full attention to Seifer, who is stunned into complete silence.

"What the _fuck_?" Squall demands. "What the hell was that about?"

Seifer is sitting like he has seen a ghost, a monster, and he is holding the steering wheel so tightly that the rubber has indented in his grip. Squall reaches, pries his hold free. There are finger grooves left when Seifer relents, relaxes, lets go.

"She was there."

And his words are like knives tracing down Squall's back. There's only one _she_ that gets referred to with that tone. He yanks free of his seat belt, throwing open the door, scrambling back up the sandy hill to the empty snake of black pavement.

He has no weapon, nothing but a pocketknife, but it's something in his hand, the blade flicking out and glinting in the sunlight. Ready for a fight, and he doesn't even know what he's supposed to expect. Time compression? The desert certainly looks like it, but it does not fade into grey smoke- on the other side of the road, there is only burnt-orange sand as far as the eye can see, and where it goes hazy and wobbly, he can blame that solely on the heat that bakes everything it touches.

There's already sweat dripping into his eyes; he wipes it away with his palm, does a three-sixty spin, hoping like hell that Seifer is wrong-

There's nothing there. Nothing. He can see the orphanage in the distance, though, the lighthouse's steady beam flashing over the ocean.

He can hear Seifer down the hill, trying to start the car and getting nothing but mournful whines for his efforts. It's toast- what is the point of building something that big if it can't stand up to a few fucking _cacti_?

Squall sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers, trying to rub out the headache that is rapidly coming home to roost there.

Witches. Witches. They're never going to be free of goddamned _witches_ , are they?

He turns, picking his way back down the incline, just as Seifer pulls himself from the ruined car, swearing up a blue streak. There's color in his face again, if one counts anger as a color. But it's not ashen, and that's an improvement. Squall doesn't say anything, just closes the distance between them.

"Hope you like walking, Leonhart," he snarls, and kicks the front wheel with such force Squall thinks he can _hear_ the metal of the hubcap indenting. Whatever levity from this morning that was left is certainly gone now. Seifer scowls, pops the trunk, chucks Squall's bag at him, gets his own.

"Before you say _anything_ , I know what the fuck I saw."

"I didn't say anything." Nothing. There's nothing up there. Seifer will see for himself; Squall slings the strap of his bag crossways over his chest, moving to the car long enough to turn off the engine and remove the keys, pocketing them. Seems silly, when there's no one around for miles who would even think about stealing it, but...

 _You have to stop her, Squall_.

Rinoa's voice, buzzing like a fly at the back of his brain, and he has to stop himself from instinctively swatting at the noise as he follows Seifer back up the hill again, scrambling up onto the hot black pavement.

Five miles, give or take- had Seifer's ghost been a warning? Or a hallucination?

Squall didn't know, and didn't have the energy to think about it, and started down the road, toward the stone house by the sea.

 _xx_

She is in the garden when they arrive, knees in the sandy dirt, apron tied around her neck and waist, a red kerchief holding back her hair. There is something soothing about being in a garden, ripping up weed and replacing them with wildflowers (the irony of planting wildflowers deliberately is not lost on Edea Kramer).

Soothing. Relaxing. God, it's hot out, the sun high overhead, but the sea breeze helps, something cool that wends narrow fingers through the malevolent heat and soothes her skin. Edea sits back on her heels, arching her back and feeling her spine pop in a couple more places than it used to when she was much younger. Before wars and Garden and a coven of witches by the sea.

There are footsteps coming up through the cracked shells she has lined the garden path with, two pairs of them. Men, by the weight they bring to bear on the shells, one taller, one shorter. Soldiers by the evenness of their strides. (It was her Garden first, after all, her training they implemented, regimens picked and chosen from her time in the Galbadian Army- everyone forgets that, that it was hers first.)

Her son, by the way complaints filter distantly to her ear- Seifer always did have a way about him, and his voice is so soothing to her soul that she leaves her gardening gloves lying in the dirt, rising to greet them.

Seifer, and Squall, both looking sun-baked and extraordinarily irritated, but whether it was because of each other's company or the fact that it was _hot_ , she couldn't tell. They had never gotten along terribly well, at least not until lately, according to Rinoa's occasional running commentary. (She has been waiting a long time for this to happen; they complement each other too well for it to have ever gone any other way, no matter how hard they both tried.)

"I thought I would see you two soon," Edea said. "Welcome home."


	16. the coven

**sixteen.**

She is waiting. She is waiting, because she is patient, and time stretches out before her an infinite thing, and if all the time she has left is forever, Rinoa can stand to wait a few minutes more. It does not stop her, however, from twitching open one of the lace curtains that cover this window in particular, looking through the narrow gap at Squall's back as he talks to Edea.

He looks healthy. Alive. Strong.

He isn't dead, hasn't been buried under a mountain of paperwork or gotten himself killed in some faraway place like she always feared. Like he's undoubtedly tried to do sometimes, at the end of his rope with her and her gifts. The girl with all the gifts, and she still doesn't get the happy ending.

(Maybe she really is going crazy.)

Rinoa drops her hand, and the curtain falls back into place, obscuring both men back into rough shadow outlines.

There's too much magic here, with all of them, and hadn't Seifer always been here first? It is inevitable that he would come home, come back to the source of his power.

She feels like an imposter now that he's arrived, trying to fill shoes that are always going to be far, far too big. Her bare toes curl into the soft carpet of the bedroom, and Rinoa decides her patience has run out. They are so close, so close that she could pick out individual thoughts from each of their brains with no more concentration than it takes to drop a teabag in a cup of boiling hot water.

She can _feel_ them, with no more effort than it takes to breathe, has known they were coming up the road for some time now- felt the crash and the scream and Seifer's rage. Lately, it's felt like the world has narrowed down to only the three of them.

And hasn't it always been just the three of them? A boy, a girl, a summer fling. A party, a boy, a dance- _you're the cutest guy here_. A cocky smirk, the beckoning of a boy in a quarry, a thunderstorm booming in the distance. _Let me add another scar for you!_

It's been them since the beginning of time, and will be them until the end of it. The lion, the wolf, the dove. Like an epic fairy tale, except she isn't sure if anyone is going to be saved at the end of it.

 _Love- friendship?_ Nothing in the face of a malevolent dragon, merciless, _kruel_ -

(pathetik SeeDs. filthy wretches.)

She inhales sharply, and expects Ultimecia to be at her back when she turns, but there is nothing there, just a painted wall and a picture of a forest hanging dead-center. She thinks it's Timber.

 _Squall, don't! I'm a sorceress-  
_

Moving now, swiftly, away from the window. She is patient to a point, but forever is a vague hypothetical, and Squall and Seifer are here _now_. She has answers for them, answers and questions both.

 _I don't care._

The hiss of wires and tubes and connections splitting open beneath his blade- a rescue, freedom. The memory is as vivid as if it were yesterday.

Seifer's magic, burning so hot Rinoa thinks he might eclipse the sun, and the way he looks at her after the war, green eyes like tumbled seaglass begging for forgiveness even if he's too prideful for the words to actually cross his lips. (Stop, please, I don't want to think about it anymore-)

She would have forgiven him from the start.

Seifer, Squall, two sides of one Garden-stamped coin. She has always been the interloper in their midst, coming between them, trying to grasp a connection that she will never be able to understand. It isn't a knighting, but it's close- god, how close it is, and even if the feeling of their connection had made her weep, she could _understand_ it. Inevitable, like the constant progression of time, a ticking clock hurtling them forward into unreachable moments until those, too, were met and felt and passed, receding into memory.

 _I don't want the future-_

Stardust bursts with every impact of her feet against the floor, and she leaves a burning trail of it as she bolts from her bedroom to the foyer.

They are there, and something in her calms, quells.

They are there.

"Hi," she says, because it's the only thing that she can think of to say.

 _xx_

He isn't expecting her, not so abruptly, but there she is so _immediately_ that Squall forgets to breathe, coughs, shoves damp brown hair back from his forehead, and decides that if he keeps his sunglasses on, he can fixate on a point somewhere just above her shoulder, and it'll still look like he's making eye contact.

He doesn't miss her, and he does, abruptly, painfully, the spot where she lives in his chest aching, an open wound.

"Hey."

Maybe it's the heat, the sweat still cascading down his face and back and basically everywhere one can _conceivably_ sweat, because he sure as shit wasn't dressed for a several-miles long trek in the desert today. Maybe that's what makes him feel like he can't _think_ suddenly, like the buzzing in his brain has been cranked up to eleven.

God- _dammit_ , why can't anything just be normal in his life, for one second?

He isn't asking for too much here, is he?

Edea offers them iced tea, something cool to ward off the reminder of their long walk, and Squall peels off to the left, following her into the kitchen without so much as another word. He can't. He can't deal with this, and he doesn't know why he thought he _could_. Why he dragged Seifer halfway around the world on this- this _goose chase_.

He drains two glasses of tea that is only slightly too tart, and pours himself a third from the pitcher before Edea comes back, and rests her hand on his arm, her skin cool against his.

Squall looks at her, and she makes him feel like he is a child again, like she can read all of his secrets. But the feeling only lasts a second- he's older now, wiser, he'd like to think. A competent adult, at least.

"Everything will be alright," she tells him, and she sounds so _sure_. How can she be so confident? How can anyone be so utterly convinced of their place in the world and the things that are to come?

He shrugs, retreating into his tea.

 _I promise_ , he breathes, and he is seventeen again, leaning against a ruined column of a building long since gone, Rinoa extracting promises from him that he swears he'll keep.

 _If you come here, you'll find me_.

The ice melts in his glass. He watches it shift, crackle, condensation forming on the outside of the cup.

"I'm supposed to save him," he says, and it sounds stupid even as he gives voice to the idea. "She said that I'm supposed to _save him_ , and I don't know what she means, Matron-"

 _xx_

It's been awhile since he and Rinoa have been in the same room together for more than a few minutes at a stretch. In fact, he's pretty sure the last time this happened, it was when he was cooped up in the brig, Rinoa sneaking down in the middle of the night to see him.

 _I just wanted to make sure you were okay_.

 _I'll be okay, princess_.

Yeah, he's turned out _great_. Losing his goddamned mind, screwing Leonhart, fucking up his life more and more with every turn he took, every decision he made, right up to hallucinating Ultimecia and forcing them into a two-hour hike in hundred and twenty degree heat.

It's a wonder they both made it here without _dying_ , 'cause all he wants to do is go throw himself in the ocean for another two hours until his body temperature returns to something like normal. The glass of tea his mother had pressed into his hands is long since empty; he turns it between his palms, the heat of his skin helping melt the ice down into something he can continue to drink without having to _wait_ for time and air and room temperature to do its work.

He's never liked waiting all that much, and it feels like that's all his life has turned into. Waiting, between a series of disasters.

"You know what's going on, don't you?" It isn't an accusation. A fact, finally laid bare between them- it occurs to Seifer that perhaps they, you know, could have _called_ the orphanage and gotten the same answers that she'll likely give them now, but here they are.

Rinoa tucks her feet up under her on the sofa, her hair impossibly long and drawn back from her face in a braid that goes down to her waist now. She looks the same, otherwise. A bit more ancient around the eyes, the look sorceresses get when they have the power of universes within them (the look his mother had, for the longest time, before her gift jumped from her body into Rinoa's).

"I don't _know_ , exactly- it's hard to explain. I just- I _feel_ her, growing. Manifesting. We killed her, and yet, I feel her coming back..." Distantly, eyes growing unfocused even as she spoke; he leaned forward, like he could discern what she was saying if he were _closer_.

Brown eyes snapped back into focus suddenly, so abruptly that Seifer sat back in his chair with the force of her gaze. God, maybe she _has_ gone nuts. It happens with sorceresses- he's considering himself a goddamned expert on the subject at this point. Edea, Ultimecia, Adel for a week, Rinoa-

None of them are sane. Hell, he's nuts, and he's not even _one_ of them.

Ellone, too, and he knows she's lurking around here somewhere, with her ability to walk through dreams.

Rinoa is looking at him, so intensely he feels like a bug pinned under glass. Seifer clears his throat, coughing briefly to interrupt her focus.

"I saw her," he says, because she is the only person he can say this to who won't think him completely bananas. "I saw her on the road, on the way up here, half dead, one of her goddamned wings missing. Like she'd been in a fight."

Ultimecia, opening her mouth as the gash in her throat gushed. Words coming soundlessly from her lips, her smile malevolent.

"She said something. She said-" He tries to think, tries to make sense of the motion of her mouth- knows it's useless. Hopeless. He can only hear the sound of his own panicked scream and the screech of the SUV's tires as he drove them straight off the road.

"It doesn't matter," Rinoa says, laying her hand over his. Her touch was once electric, and now it feels more like a ghost, cool against his skin. "We'll figure it out."

 _xx_

Edea draws him into her arms, shorter than he is and yet he lets himself be held, reluctantly, shoulders tense.

"It'll be alright," she whispers into his ear; he wishes he could believe her, he wishes she wasn't lying to him.


	17. the immolation

Ellone is seated on his left, her hair longer, her eyes bright and more freckles on her cheeks than Squall remembers there being. Seifer sits across, a beer he's dragged up from somewhere open at the corner of his placemat. Rinoa on the long bench next to him, her presence making all the hair on his arms stand up on end like she's unaware she's doing it. Edea, presiding over the head of the table.

It is, undoubtedly, the strangest family dinner any of them have ever taken part in.

Everywhere, food, rich and home-cooked, almost too much of it. She's made enough for an army. Squall obediently takes the plate he's handed, scoops a pile of fragrant green beans and slivered almonds onto his plate, and passes it on. It makes him wonder if this is a daily occurrence, or if Edea had _known_ they were coming- she had to have. No one cooks up this much without some advance notice, right?

(Rinoa, he thinks, must keep her apprised of things, the way she phases and shifts through time like it is nothing more than a gauzy veil to be parted. Squall catches her looking at him, and holds her gaze for a heartbeat longer than necessary before he slides his eyes away. The bond strains like a trapped bird between them, but it doesn't hurt as badly this time, even now that she is less than a foot away.)

The narrow rectangular table is the same as he remembers, driftwood dragged up from the beaches, honed into flat planks and assembled by Cid's careful, meticulous hands, sanded soft, varnished against all the fingers and elbows and warm plates and spills that would undoubtedly ensue over the years. There are scrawls of color, a curlicue of green beneath his elbow, faded from the sun that shines through the big bay window at his back. More streaks, stubborn against the attempts to clean, fighting a war that they might just win against the sun itself.

It is the only thing here that looks the same at all.

Edea has been busy in her self-imposed exile, rebuilding the whole structure so it's habitable, new walls, fresh paint, a long porch that wraps around the entire place so that anyone who needs can escape out of doors without needing to go terribly far.

The small talk is infrequent, limited to food and drink, swelling to include a quip from Seifer about something Ellone has said, a snark-fueled reply tossed right back at him, a brief burst of laughter. It ebbs to fill the air only with the sounds of chewing, the clink of knives and forks against porcelain plates, the whole spectacle ending in coffee and tea all around, dessert in the form of vanilla ice cream.

When his spoon hits the bottom of the bowl, he has to lean back and wonder if he's going to be able to move again any time soon, or if he'll simply need to be rolled to the nearest flat surface and sleep for several days. He can't remember having eaten that much since... maybe the last time he was here, actually, or at least having eaten that much of anything _good_ , rather than the bland, nutrient- and calorie-dense offerings of the caf, designed to fuel as many bodies efficiently as possible with the least chance of waste.

The theory of simply laying his head on his arms and napping right there at the table is dashed when chairs start to scrape back, Squall forcing himself to follow suit as people start to rise, taking plates and serving dishes that still have enough left over in them to last at least two more meals, or a couple of midnight snacks. Edea puts him on tupperware duty; Squall obediently scrapes food into plastic containers and susses out matching lids, or at least ones that will fit, from the cabinet above the stove.

Seifer is given the task of hauling out the week's trash and recycling. It seems deliberate, and the air in the room seems to genuinely exhale as the screen door bangs shut in his wake, like they were holding collective breath.

It's all too familiar a feeling, and so Squall stacks the leftovers in the refrigerator, following Seifer out of doors into the lingering twilight. It's still warm even with the merciless sun's descent. His shirt is already sticking to his skin again by the time he locates his (friend? lover? Whatever the fuck they are, if they need to be anything at all.)

It doesn't surprise him, that he finds Seifer by the sea. In it, really. His hands are tucked into the pockets of his shorts, eyes fixed on the rising tide like he hasn't seen it in a very long time, like he doesn't live two seconds away from a beach on a goddamned _island_. His feet are bare, his shoes abandoned like a simple trail for Squall to follow.

The water rushes up along his ankles, and withdraws. Charges, falls back, repeated and repeated, the stubbornness of nature unfolding in all its glory. Seifer isn't the only one who doesn't give up easily.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, but Squall doesn't feel like digging for it. He crouches, unlacing his boots, peeling off white socks that he balls up neatly and tucks inside one heavy dark shoe. He sets them near Seifer's, adds his phone to the small pile for good measure, and approaches.

"You're not exactly dressed for swimming," he points out.

"Never stopped me before." He _is_ here then, fully present and alert, even if his gaze is a thousand miles away. The water embraces them both, and Squall shifts at the unexpected warmth of it, so unlike Balamb's persistent initial chill until you suck it up, dunk yourself beneath the waves, and learn to adapt.

Here, it's shimmering turquoise and warm as bathwater- he remembers half-focused moments from his childhood, spent playing in the shallows. Maybe bringing Seifer here is safety enough; isn't this _home_ , after all?

But he's not stupid enough to think that this will fill Rinoa's prophecy, that one bad hallucination and a wrecked SUV to show for it is the worst they will have to go through.

God, Squall Leonhart is so _tired_ of fighting, all the time, every second of every day, battling witches and wars and missions and the fights Seifer likes to pick just because it terrifies him to be _honest_ about anything.

Impulsively, he peels off his t-shirt, pitching it back toward the rest of his clothing, shucks off his jeans for the loose grey shorts beneath, and charges forward into the water. A clean dive beneath an oncoming wave; he is suddenly a dozen feet from the shore, salt in his eyes and his hair pushed back in an untidy mess.

Seifer is watching him, confusion and amusement probably playing havoc over his face, but it's too far away to really tell.

"You coming, or not?" Squall yells over the noise of the sea. It is all the invitation Seifer needs to barrel into the rising tide with all the force of a freight train, never a challenge issued between the two of them that the other has not immediately risen to meet.

Squall grabs him before he can cut past with a broad armed stroke that threatens to take him halfway to the horizon, muscles bunching in his arm with the effort to stop Seifer's mad flight.

"Where are you going? Esthar?"

If he could bottle Seifer's laughter, the way he throws his head back and is haloed by the dying sunlight, he would- it will have to do to just _burn_ the memory into his brain, something to come back to long after this is all over, the way he looks, the way his arms come around Squall's waist and draw him close.

When Seifer kisses him, it tastes like drowning.

It's so easy to cling to him then, to hold fast in water that rises higher and higher, until the waves knock them apart, and they come up separated and reaching for each other over and over again, so simple that it scares him a little bit.

( _I don't need anyone-_ but he's not fine on his own, not anymore.)

 _xx_

They end up drenched and saltwater-logged on the rocks by the lighthouse, shoulders bumping together, the orphanage and half their clothes far off in the distance. His fingers loop through Squall's without thinking, the gesture absent and startling in its intimacy all at once.

The waves beat against the rocks a couple of feet below, and there's the slim fin of something dark and unidentifiable in the water that cuts up, then vanishes just as abruptly.

"Dolphin?" 

"Maybe. I can't really tell."

"Well, if it jumps up and tries to eat us, we'll know we're wrong." Squall's laugh is low, a rumble that Seifer feels through their hands, skin to damp skin.

Maybe he should feel stranger about this than he does, but instead he just feels a relief to give into the aftermath of what they've become. Something has changed irrevocably between them; they will never go back to what they were before. Seifer doesn't think he wants to.

The sun has set, and the stars are out tonight.

He gazes out at the unfurling glittering mass above them, ragged at the edges with cliffs and waves; it takes a moment before he realizes that Squall's head has dropped lower, coming to rest on his shoulder. He isn't asleep, when Seifer glances down to check, but his grey eyes are aimed at a distant, unseen point.

There's magic here in the stillness between them.

Seifer opens his free palm toward the sky, and the sparks that flicker out of his skin dance up to burst like fireworks and fade away.

"Do that again," Squall murmurs.

He does it again, drawing on spells that come as naturally as air, drawing a phoenix with rough sketches of his fingers, sending it soaring high above. It freewheels beneath the nearly-full moon, and without warning, bursts into smoke.


End file.
